Has the Mozilla team done it? Have they made a browser that will finally be able to take up the fight with Internet Explorer? In my eyes, they have and with great style. Their new release in the Firefox branch has in many ways swept me off my feet. It’s fast becoming the number one choice for web browsers, and with a good reason. Firefox is nothing short of revolutionary.

Being a blogger and also being a nerd, you tend to be concerned about your pages being compliant to current web standards. Meaning, you want your XHTML, CSS, RSS etc to be correct and compliant so that it displays correctly in most browsers. Not only does Firefox do a great job at being compliant to these standards, but it’s built in support RSS is awesome! Your feeds go into your bookmarks, and whenever you go to a feed in your bookmarks the feed is updated automatically. It’s never been easier to see if a site you’re watching has been updated.

The list of new features in the new Firefox is quite long, but I’ll list a few of them here.

• Live Bookmarks.
  The ability to subscribe to RSS feeds in your bookmarks. When you happen to surf by a site that offers RSS feeds, a icon appears in your statusbar. All you gotta do is click on the icon, and choose whatever feed you want to subscribe to.
• Improved find.
  You now have a find tool bar which appears whenever you conduct a search in the current document. And I gotta say, it’s awesome Never has it been easier to find something, and with its built in automatic highlighting of search matches you spend less time finding what you’re looking for. I love this feature, being a coder/programmer. And of course, the ‘type as you go’ find feature is still there for links.
• Managing Annoyances and Protecting Security.
  Finally the extension system blocks attempts to install extensions from all sites other than update.mozilla.org. If you want to install extensions from a site other than Mozilla’s official site, you need to add the site into a list of approved sites. If a popup is blocked, you now have the ability to open it if it was an “important” popup. God knows why they haven’t had this feature before, but at least it’s there now. Another feature that I love, is that it now changes the colour of the address bar whenever you enter a HTTPS enabled site. As long as you see that the address bar is yellow, you know it’s secure to transfer your personal details and credit card details when doing an online purchase.
• Strong Encryption For Passwords Available.
  Finally Firefox has support for strong encrypted passwords. Consider this situation, you use a computer in a place that more than yourself have access to it and use it on a daily basis. Previously, all the passwords stored by Firefox’s password manager were stored unencrypted meaning that anyone with a bit of computer insight could easily steal your passwords. Well fear no more, now your passwords are stored encrypted and each time you start up Firefox it will ask for a master password that unlocks the usage of password manager. If the wrong password is supplied, password manager just lies dormant doing nothing.

Well, all I have to say to Microsoft is; Fear Firefox. I have recommended Firefox to all of my friends for ages, and I ditched IE ages ago for being bloated and prone with security issues. By this, I’m not saying that Firefox doesn’t have any security issues, any program has security issues. But it’s all about the severeness of them that is important to me. Firefox just keeps on getting better and better, and is for me the only choice. If you haven’t tried it already, I suggest you head over to Firefox’s page right now and download it. You will not regret it.

I’ve embraced Firefox as my new favourite pet. Do yourself a favour, do the same thing.

Ah well, the summer Olympics has been launched with a huge open ceremony as always with modern Olympics with well trained athletics just bursting to prove that they’re the worlds best and to set new world records. I have to admit, I’m not overly enthusiastic with this years Olympics, not at all. It might be that I’m a bit superstitious, but I’ve had a bad feeling about this Olympics for a long time, and when I heard news that the Olympic flame went out just a few days ago I became even more “nervous”. I have a feeling that something bad will happen during these games. What it is, I don’t know but it will be something. One thing that it will be remembered for, is the amount of participants that will be proven to have used anabolic steroids.

Another thing is the amount of firepower and security these games have, which I can perfectly understand in these days of modern terrorism. But many of the images I’ve seen published on the net the last few weeks are very disturbing. Right in the middle of urban areas we now see mounted firepower in such masses that it easily could be enough to settle a small war. The amount of money spent on both military arsenal and other security forces, plus the added amount spent on the games themselves (stadiums, advertisement etc etc) are enormous! I don’t know, but I just get the feeling that this money could have been spent otherwise. The way I see it, the last few Olympics has all been about who could build the best and largest stadiums, much like a “I got a bigger penis than you have”-competition. This is not what the Olympics are about, it’s about bringing a diversity of people together to enjoy each others company and to compete on equal grounds. I think this is all overclouded by the commercialism of the modern games, the use of illegal drugs and the massive military presence. Let’s just hope that the future proves me wrong, and that the Greeks have a great event that will be remembered for what it was, a great sporting event, not just a theater for the masses to prove the commercial value of what the modern games has turned out to be.