Weiqi Gao's Observations - firefox tag

Firefox 3.5 Means Never Having To Say I'm Sorry (For My Video Format)

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:26:53 GMT

Have you 3.5-ed yet?

I installed Firefox 3.5 on my Windows boxes, but not on my Linux boxes because Mozilla.org does not offer 64-bit Linux builds. One of the features of Firefox 3.5 is the support of the Ogg Theora video file format, which is the format of all of the screencasts I posted on this blog.

I use Ogg Theora because it is the native encoding format of the recordMyDesktop screen capture utility for Gnome. Since this format was not natively supported on Windows or Max OS X, every time I post one of my screencasts/demos, I have to put in a disclaimer—"Linuxy format, download VLC to view".

Not any more! Now you can view it directly in Firefox 3.5:

Sorry, your browser does not support the HTML 5 <video> tag. Get one that does.

(The video is from an old blog entry of mine showing JavaFX 1.0 playing Ogg Theora video files on Linux.)

Let the next round of the browser war begin!

Killing Flash But Not Firefox: Yes You Can (On 64-bit Debian)

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:31:35 GMT

Reading the Google Chrome comic book last week lead me to the following line of thoughts:

A: It would be nice if I can kill a tab as easily in Firefox as in Google Chrome.
B: Nah, I can't because everything runs in the same process.
A: But those darn Flash/Flex apps—they routinely eats 100% of my CPU and hang all tabs, all the time
B: Too bad they are in-proc. But wait, they aren't on 64-bit Debian.

Recall that Adobe provides their Flash plug-in for 32-bit Linux only. And to use it in 64-bit Linux, a nspluginwrapper is needed (as I reported 410 days ago.)

Yesterday, I got into one of those situations where Firefox is using 100% CPU and is not responding. I fired up SystemMonitor and sure enough, underneath firefox-bin there is a subprocess called nsviewer.bin. I killed the nsviewer.bin process and Firefox (well, IceWeasel, to be precise) became responsive again.

I was happy.

Firefox 3 Download Day

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:22:15 GMT

I wouldn't have known this had I not bumped into a rant by Stephen Colebourne about the timing of the planned download day.

According to the Mozilla Blog, the Firefox 3 release and download day is today (June 17, 2008) and will begin around 10:00 a.m. PDT, which will be 12:00 p.m. CDT (our time). You still have time to pledge that you will download Firefox 3 on the first day of release.

The word on the street is that the final release will be exactly the same as the RC3, which I have been using lately and encountered very little problems.

The most interesting feature of Firefox 3, for me at least, is its support for the New Java Plugin, which I hope will bring about a renaissance of Java on the desktop.

[Update] Great. Now that they've focused the attention of 1.7 million users to go to their website around the same moment, guess what that website looks like? It's slashdotted!