Seems like every couple months people start crying ‘the sky is falling’ with Firefox and Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plugins. Earlier this week there was a flurry of activity with Bug 1165981. Again people seem to think that Firefox is not going support NPAPI plugins anymore on Windows since the 64-Bit (Win64) versions does not (except for Flash). As a reminder the removal of NPAPI support only applies to the Win64 version of Firefox. The 32-bit Windows version still supports all the NPAPI plugins including Java and Silverlight. However, Mozilla does plan on discontinuing support in the future with the Firefox 32-bit…
Articles by ElGuru
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Nothing worse than getting a Blue Screen of Death aka BSOD when Windows has a critical crash due to hardware or software issue. Worse yet, the screen contained a cryptic message about what went wrong along with a long hexadecimal code. Coming in the Windows 10 Anniversary Edition Update (August 2016), the BSOD will include a QR code which can be scanned by a smartphone or tablet. However, Microsoft has an opportunity here for aiding self-support when it comes to problem-solving a Windows installation as it could offer assistance via a website or even a dedicated app for troubleshooting using…
New to Thunderbird 45 is the addition of Correspondents column combining Sender and Recipient with an arrow on the left side of the email address. This ‘feature’ was request about 16-years ago (read all about it in Bug 36489). As I mentioned in the previous post, it is not the name change that bothers me, rather it is the arrow that was added. After some reading the later comments I found out the ‘From’ column was not removed, simply hidden and replaced by Correspondents. The fix to this is very easy and it does not involve add-ons or even custom CSS coding: Right-click anywhere on…
Mozilla released the next major update for Thunderbird on April 12th, 2016. Thunderbird 45. There are many changes and fixes in this version which can be viewed in the Release Notes. One of the most noticeable changes is the addition of Correspondents column combining Sender and Recipient with an arrow on the left side of the email address. I don’t understand the purpose of this and even more so after reading Bug 36489 which dates back to almost 16-years ago (April 20, 2000). Frankly, I don’t like the change. It’s not the name change which I could use to, but rather adding the arrow. Good news…
During this week’s Mozilla Weekly Updates Meeting, the release date for Firefox 46 has been pushed back a week from April 19th to April 26th. The channel merges for Beta and Developer Edition (Aurora) will also be pushed back a week. No information is available at this time why the release date was pushed back.
It has been a while since I have had a chance to update this site. Here are the most recent Thunderbird Releases: 45.0.0 — April 12th, 2016* 38.7.2 — April 4th, 2016 — Disabled Graphite font shaping library 38.7.1 — March 25th, 2016 — Disabled Graphite font shaping library 38.7.0 — March 14th, 2016 — Various security fixes 38.6.0 — February 16th, 2016 — Addressed couple behavior issues 38.5.1 — January 7th, 2016 — Introduced new SHA-256 signing certificate (Windows Only) * Thunderbird 45 currently available for download only (no update) as of April 12th, 2016. Users will likely be offered the update in the next few days.
It has been about 3-months since I last posted. I had to retire the machine I was running Windows 10 on, an old Dell Optiplex as it was having hardware issues. I did not want to be putting money into a system that is over 10-years old, especially since I only paid $25 for it last year. Yet, I currently do not plan on upgrading anytime soon to Windows 10 on either of my two machines (Gateway Windows 8 Desktop and HP Windows 7 Laptop). Still not sure what I am going to do as I would like to try out Windows 10…
Yes, it has been a while since The Guru has posted non-release news. Here’s some Firefox news from the past month. Firefox for iOS adds Security Features (The Mozilla Blog)- Changes to the Firefox Password Manager now allow iPhone/iPad users to add a 4-Digit password to the password manager for extra security. Inviting Conversation (Mitchell’s Blog) – Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Foundation Chair is looking to invite conversation about the Open Internet, Mozilla and Mozilla’s mission in a series of upcoming less “official” blog posts. Shipping Some Firefox Features Outside of the Release Cycle (Mozilla Future Releases) – Now new bloat features will be introduced more often and…
Mozilla released the next major update for Firefox on January 26th with Firefox 44. New features in this release included: Improved warning pages for certificate errors and untrusted connections Enable H.264 if system decoder is available Enable WebM/VP9 video support on systems that don’t support MP4/H.264 In the animation-inspector timeline, lightning bolt icon next to animations running on the compositor thread Support the brotli compression format via HTTPS content-encoding Screenshot commands allow user choice of pixel ratio in Developer Tools Firefox Can Now Get Push Notifications From Your Favorite Sites There were some fixes and other items in this release…
Mozilla has announced they are tweaking the Firefox release schedule for 2016. They still plan on pushing out the same amount of releases per year, just the timing between releases is going to fluctuate between 6 to 8 weeks. Four years ago Mozilla moved to a fixed-schedule release model, otherwise known as theTrain Model, in which we released Firefox every six weeks to get features and updates to users faster and move at the speed of the Web. We studied the process carefully and learned a lot. We have also identified additional areas for improvement and it’s time we iterate…