Phoenix/Mozilla Firebird/Firefox seen through 9 releases

How has the look of the browser-once-known-as-Phoenix changed over the releases? here is a quick tour of the visual appearance of the browser. The main result: almost two years now of evolution, but some theme changes aside, 0.9 still feels like 0.2 did. The best browser!

First release (20020923), Phoenix 0.1 still has the Orbit 3+1 look, sports the red rising phoenix and has large buttons by default.

Phoenix 0.2, released 8 days later (wow, talk about a release cycle). The reload and stop buttons are now on the left, and are small by default. There is now a search bar, and the drop down of the URL navigation field is not themed.

Phoenix 0.3, released 2 weeks later (20021014), has few things changed. There is a "Go" menu, and the status bar lost a thin vertical line.

Phoenix 0.4, also released 2 weeks later. Except for the new "Home" button on by default, nothing has changed.

Phoenix 0.5, released 20021207. Changes in the statusbar: it is now deeper and sports diagonal "grippies" in the lower right-hand corner. The Toolbar folder also includes "Phoenix help" by David Tenser. The "About" box has a white background for the version information.

Mozilla Firebird 0.6, released 20030516, more than 6 months later. It has taken a lot of time to go from 0.5 to 0.6: new theme Qute, new name, still the same About box.

Mozilla Firebird 0.7, released 20031007. Lots of improvements to the theme. Firebird now has an icon (based on the red phoenix); a throbber is on by default; the default search engine is now Google; there is a style sheet picker in the lower left hand corner; the start page is now the one for Firefox (and not Mozilla). the About box has been styled with the red phoenix.

FirebirdFirefox 0.8, released 20040210. New visual identity! New logo used on the official builds, new name, but few theme upgrades. The About box is completely redone with the new visual identity.

Firefox 0.9, 20040614. Four months after 0.8, and a new name and a new default theme, Winstripe.
< sarcasm on > I guess the team has learnt how to change names and themes faster < sarcasm off >This "witty" comment no longer applies...

Update: Of course, how could I forget Firefox 0.9.1... well, I did, and on purpose, even though many things have changed for the better, because I limited myself to full releases.

Batteries and backups

Note to self: remember to charge the batteries more often and to do backups of my Clié more regularly. It's the second time I've lost evertyhing and had to go back to a very old backup. If I miss an appointment, at least you'll know why...
Better yet but a bit more expensive: change the rescue battery in the Clié, if it exists (Clié T615, I'll have to look it up).

Mozilla most security conscious organization

Jesse Ruderman has a comment on Slashdot and on his blog where he compares the responses to a common security bug shared between Firefox/Mozilla, Opera and Internet Explorer.

In three days Firefox was patched and released, in 10 days Microsoft acknowledged the message and gave a workaround, and Opera hasn't written back yet. Way to go Mozilla!

Winmodems in Linux

Winmodems are not modems, and they don't work in Linux. This is a comment often seen on the web. But there is a way: I had an old-ish Toshiba laptop (Satellite 4090XDVD, full specs) with an internal modem I intended to use since it's the only modem I have at home. Of course, it's a Winmodem. But could it be made to work in Linux? I had tried 4 years ago and it didn't. So I started again, installed RedHat Linux 9 (because I had the burned CDs), and began digging. This is my tale of success...
Read more

I'll document this as I go along.

Scanning for the modem

First stop, the scanModem tool. This is a shell program that tries to detect what type of modem you have (the chipset) and produces a diagnosis. In my case I was lucky because the modem has a Lucent/Agere chipset, which has a driver.

Class 0780: 11c1:0441 Communication controller: Lucent Microelectronics 56k WinModem (rev 01)
SubSystem 1179:0001 Toshiba America Info Systems Internal V.90 Modem
The modem has a supported Lucent/Agere DSP (digital signal processing) chipset
with primary PCI_ID: 11c1:0441
A suitable Installer is at http://ltmodem.heby.de/
in the section: redhat
ltmodem-kv_2.4.20_8-8.26a9-1.i686.rpm


So I only had to download a rpm file, and install it! how simpler could it get?

Making the connection

In the rpm file was included wvdial, a smart utility that with minimal configuration tries to guess the type of PPP connection to make. Compared to all the different scripts and possible configurations you can have in PPP/CHAT/PAP authentication, it sounded good and seemed to work: just by setting my ISP phone number and password, the modem made the right noises and the connection seemed to start... but each and every time the modem hung up

--> Carrier detected. Waiting for prompt.
~[7f]}#@!}!t} }8}"}&} } } } }#}$@#}%}&}#d'[12]}'}"}(}"k"~
--> PPP negotiation detected.
--> Starting pppd at Thu Jul 1 07:54:40 2004
--> pid of pppd: 2076
--> Disconnecting at Thu Jul 1 07:55:01 2004
--> The PPP daemon has died: A modem hung up the phone (exit code = 16)


(I'm not the only one to have seen this)
I never did manage to get wvdial to work. However I started looking at some sample configurations of PPP, and even found one used by my French ISP, and it worked ! If you use free.fr, take a look at this PPP configuration page, it really cut the cheese for me.

Next episode: getting IP masquerading to work. To be continued...

Trackback and Blogger

Thanks to HaloScan I now seem to have trackback URLs in my posts. Off to testing...

Annoying Critical Update Available?

I installed Firefox 0.9.1 and since I've had a small yellow-on-red exclamation mark on the status bar, right hand corner. The tooltip reads "Critical Update(s) Available": Firefox 0.9.1. But I already have it! I guess it's a bug in the system. If you have this problem too, you can change one variable in your user.js or about:config:

user_pref("update.app.updatesAvailable", false");

and restart Firefox. Voilà!

New version 0.3 of GMailCompose

If you use Gmail and Firefox, you can now left-click on mailto: links and get a GMail compose window to open ! Get GMailCompose now, thanks to the good work of Jedbro.