Avencius

Yah, I know, if this are to be 'my' website, I should blog as promised in the website's title =) Starting from this coming Friday I'll be pretty busy spending the last remains of my free time, aka unused social time (geeks don't have that :P), on Blizzard's artwork known as World of Warcraft, as it will be finally released here in Europe.

In the ancient past and history of #medic and #meat, I was learned that MMORPG can be bad for your life, I know this, but I need it as well. A little, or bigger, distraction of the daily life. Hope you'll understand.

Well, that's the blog for today! More will come soon I guess, looking at the read stats of this site, there is little difference in the amount of reads between news items and blogs.

Feel natural! Nature's way!

Update: I've allowed anonymous comments again, let's see what will happen.

Update 2: The Avencius 2 theme has been updated to have more image reuse. I've disabled the wolf and support blocks for now, but they'll return when I have a better design.

Although Mozilla Firefox supports tabbed browsing by default, it's rather basic. Instead advanced power users can use the small, yet very useful, Firefox extension to unleash more tabbed browsing power. Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.2 extends the basic functionality with useful options as new tab buttons in the tab bar, force opening new windows as new tabs and much more. This release comes with a limited set of supported locales and only takes 55 KB.

A recommended download for all tabbed browsing Firefox users!

People have been asking for a change, a change in Opera Software's image, making it more cool. So here's your chance! Opera is asking for your entries in their search for the perfect mascot!

Mascot callout

Calling all creative minds! Opera is evaluating the idea of creating a mascot and we want your help. As loyal Opera users, you know what Opera stands for and understand our mission to provide the best Internet experience for everyone, on any device. We want a mascot that accurately represents us, meaning the company and the community. Please give us your ideas and we will take your suggestions into consideration. Let us know why you are for or against a mascot. Send your own mascot design. Or simply make a list of your detailed suggestions. We appreciate your feedback and hope that you take our request for your ideas seriously, as we will seriously evaluate your contributions. Thank you.

Opera Software officially released Opera 7.54u2. This release is mainly a security update, solving two issues from the Secunia advisories.

Changes since 7.54u1:

Security

• Solved data URL issue described in Secunia Advisory SA13818
• Additional fixes for frame injection issue reported in Secunia Advisory SA13253

Miscellaneous

• Improvements to handling of the must-revalidate directive.
• Solved stability issue in Japanese version.

Wired News has posted a story titled "Opera, the Forgotten Browser". The story deals with the recent uprise of superstar Firefox, how this affects Opera and about the upcoming Opera release, which has yet to be named.

"Obviously we would have liked it if Opera got more media attention. At the same time, we believe it is good news that there is more interest in browsers," said von Tetzchner. "We now need to work hard to make the most of this opportunity. We believe we have a product that can handle comparison very well."

The newest version of Opera -- its name is still a secret -- is slated to be released in February. Among the new features is the Trash Can, an oddly named but useful addition that acts as a sort of extended bookmark for stored history. The Trash Can also allows users to save a series of pages as a "session" and then reload that session later.

Several users already indicated in the My Opera Forums that a new version of Opera 7.54 has appeared. On the FTP server there is a new folder containing the Opera 7.54u2 release, which probably is a second security update for the stable release.

Please note that until an official announcement is made, this release has no changelog yet. If it's security related, the question remains if the currect Opera 8 Beta is vulnerable as well.

Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla Foundation updated his blog with some nice statistics. Showing an increasing interest in both products, congrats! =)

twenty five million downloads

Today, Thunderbird 1.0 broke the 3,000,000 downloads mark and Firefox 1.0 broke the 22,000,000 mark. Happy day!!

update: Oh, I forgot to mention. We just wrapped up our third month since Firefox 1.0 was released. For the first two weeks, we had an amazing number of downloads, but for the last ten weeks, it's still quite strong -- averaging just over 1.6 million downloads per week. This 12th week was right on track, pulling in 1.62 million downloads. Good times!

update2: Oh, and I forgot to mention ;) Thunderbird's 3 million downloads happened in just 8 weeks. Rock on!

Opera Software announced today their reseller agreement with LynuxWorks' embedded devices.

Unlimited Opera: Opera and LynuxWorks enter into reseller agreement
Oslo, Norway - February 2, 2005

Opera Software ASA and LynuxWorks™, a leading provider in the embedded software industry, today announced that the Opera browser will be an available option with LynuxWorks' BlueCat® Linux® embedded operating system. The two companies have entered into a reseller agreement, allowing LynuxWorks to resell the Opera browser to its customers as an available option to its BlueCat Linux solutions package.

"The Opera browser is a welcome enhancement to our BlueCat Linux operating system," said Dr. Inder Singh, chairman and CEO for LynuxWorks. "We sought a browser that would provide our users with an unmatched Internet experience that would be safe, fast and easy. Opera met all of our needs and more. We are excited to offer this browser as a part of our solutions package."

Ben Goodger updated his blog with news regarding the Firefox 1.1 release. 1.1 will be focused on stability and web compatibility, but will also include a new preferences window reported earlier. Ben reports that the road to 1.1 final will be a bit longer, and talks about several test versions.

1.1 Schedule Update

In a move that I would hope should surprise exactly nobody, we're pushing back 1.1 by a little bit because of the realities of the work remaining to be done (I have a lot of patches that need to be landed, tested, bugfixed, there are other patches from other people to which the same applies; also we need a reasonable stabilization period and a resurrection of the l10n infrastructure in order to do a release of similar quality and range to 1.0.) Asa is working on an updated roadmap graphic, which will offer more details. The likely possibility is a 1.1 Developer Preview (= alpha, NOT for general consumption), followed by a 1.1 Preview Release (= beta, wider consumption, feature complete), followed by RCs and a 1.1. We're not fixed on dates yet, but this is just a heads up.