Windows Vista (previously codenamed Longhorn) has been released to manufacturing. It will be made available to business customers by the end of the month and to personal users by the end of January 2007.
I assume that the version available from the end of January 2007 will be patched upto date with any patches released between now and then. If that’s not the case then why not just release it to the public now? (more…)
Mozilla are looking for testers using Windows Vista (a recent release candidate). If you are interested email marcia (at) mozilla (dot) org and you’ll be notified of any areas that need testing.
It looks like Firefox 2 will have a point release to improve Vista compatibility, this should occur before Vista hits the streets for public consumption in January. It’s likely that this release will have the same toolbar layout as under XP so it won’t look like a native application, however, the support for native themes in Mozilla apps means that the widgets and colour schemes will still look correct.
It’s likely that Mozilla will work on making Firefox and Thunderbird look like native Vista apps in the future (maybe Firefox 3). This will be good as long as they keep the traditional look for XP and earlier as otherwise, like IE7, the browser will not fit in with the platform conventions.
Ideally when under Vista I’d like to see Firefox comply with the platform conventions, which would mean a different toolbar layout, but it’d be good to make it customisable enough to make the XP layout also available to Vista and vice-versa. But the defaults should be right for each platform.
Even if you’re not using Vista there’s still plenty you could do to help the QA team. If you’re an experienced tester your skills would be welcome and if you’re new to testing this can give you very useful experience with writing good bug reports, working on a large project, working with bug tracking systems, etc. A good place to keep an eye on is the QA blog. Events called bug days are frequently held to help newcomers get started.
Been travelling for a few days, updates will appear here in a few days time.
Well done to the Democrats in the US midterm elections, hopefully some balance in US politics will be a good thing.
Now IE7 is available as an automatic high-priority update via Windows Update I wonder how many people will wonder what has happened to their browser.
Posing such a drastic UI change on the user in the form of an automatic update is a bad idea.
As promised earlier I asked an IE 6 user to try out Firefox 2 for a week and to let us know their opinions. Thanks go to Ian Charlton for this review - A Week with Firefox 2. This review is from someone who has not used Firefox previously but with the changes up ahead with IE7 decided this was as good a time as any to try out the other options. Ian has had good experiences with Firefox and this has motivated him to try Opera too, maybe we’ll get another review if he’s not too busy.
As for other reviews, I’m still writing my review of Firefox 2 on Mac OSX and if you’ve not seen it already, there’s the “A Week With IE7” review that I’d written following the launch of IE7.
Take a look at aigars.co.uk, at first appearance it looks quite legitimate, but as some investigation shows this site is just one in a large number of long running scams. The way they work is by using a payment method such as Western Union money transfer to send the cash to one of their ’sales representatives’, who will use fake identity documents to collect the money without being traced. Although the site lists a London address, they’re not based at the address, but they did make the effort to make it a valid address.
Although these sites don’t fit in with the typical definition of phishing they’re still scam sites and so I’d like to see browsers phishing detectors flag these sites, once aigars.co.uk disappears a similar site with a different domain will appear and the fun will start all again. Currently it’s not picked up in either the IE or Firefox filters, I have submitted the site but as it looks genuine on the surface then they may not flag it.