Damn. The year was almost over when suddenly the influenza hit me out of nowhere. Besides having to limit my online presence on the computer to a very small amount of time and dedicating the rest of the day to sleeping it seems that I am back on the track within the next days (just before Christmas Eve).

In those mentioned few hours I gave my online representation new clothes and fooled around with some new wordpress plugins. When browsing slashdot, reddit and digg I clearly could not resist the new Firefox 3 Beta 2 which can be downloaded here.

I cannot remember if I was testing some Firefox 3 Alpha or Beta 1 release some weeks ago but at that time I removed it from my system after less than 10 minutes. This time it’s a completely different story. Even though that most of the plugins do not work anymore (at least at the moment) the new core features are overwhelming.

My favourites are

• the new location bar,
• a download manager with minor changes,
• an improved bookmarking system/bookmark manager,
• and improved application preferences.

I am sure there are other new things as well (besides better memory handling and an interface with an overall quicker response behaviour) but I only used it for one hour or so and yet alone those impressions let me remove Firefox 2 and switch to Firefox 3 instantly.

One of the most important plugins (AdBlock Plus) already supports the nightly build 3.0b3pre… so no problems here. The “remember domain mismatch” plugin seems to be obsolete due to improved certificate handling. Maybe you happened to surf any website (usually company webmail frontends via https) which did not have a trusted certificate. I constantly was annoyed in Firefox 2 that I had to press the OK button every time I went to such pages. Now the browser gives you the ability to trust the certificate permanently (via a new thing called “add an exception”). From now on you can store “security exceptions” permanently. Surely you should know what you are doing if you do permanent security exceptions but I think it’s a huge step forward in a browser to trust it’s users abilities.

The great thing about the location bar/bookmarking thing is maybe something you have to experience yourself. There is a new small “star” icon in the location bar which lets you add the current URL to the “Smart Bookmarks” with one single click. If you click it again you already can chose a target bookmark folder for the current link or… wait a second… here it comes… you can TAG it. Yep. Bookmark tagging. Just great. You do not have to think about folder hierarchies for your bookmarks anymore. So there are multiple ways to navigate through bookmarks. Just type parts of the URL into the location bar and your bookmarked favourites are on top of the browsing history with matching URLs (now including the favicons in the dropdown list which itself is very very nice). Or you browse by tag by entering the tag name into the location bar. Or you just simply browse your beloved folder hierarchy.

Oh… and now a thing I missed for a long time already: a nice tab in the preferences which is labelled “Applications”. There you can sign any application you want to any supported content type/extension. And in the Extensions/Themes dialog there is now a new tab too » “Plugins”. Times of “about:plugins” seem to be over.

My installation almost passed the Acid2 test (and I guess the final version will pass it without any problems) and on my system (currently Mac OS X Leopard) it is the clear winner on that test in comparison with other browsers (recent stable versions of firefox, safari and opera).
Will try it on my debian sid box tomorrow maybe but as for now I am quite happy (and I am sure the web developer plugin will be available soon). A big Thank you goes out to the pepole contributing to the Firefox project (type about:credits into your Firefox location bar). And of course to the friends of firefox too.

After having thought about it for months I finally had some time to setup the Pulpmedia code vault. The primary goal of the platform is to give me and other pulpmedia programmers the chance to give the open source community something back. We are using open source tools and codes for several years now and especially in web development you can drive your whole business on open source products. Besides our usual commitment we are going to publish one or another web dev library from time to time. It may still look a bit rough (hey… I am a programer) but there are many features planned for the future.

“Goodbye privacy” is the motto of this year’s Ars Electronica Festival. The festival is held by the Ars Electronica Center which is the most famous technology institute in Austria with many young programmers and artists who collaborate with programmers and artists from all around the world. The main goal seems to be to explore new ways of how to use modern technologies and often artistic usage.
This year the size of the festival is incredible. There is a street where all the empty buildings are occupied with special exhibitions. The main theme seems to be second life as you can see many connections to the virtual world. For me “Goodbye privacy” affects me somehow twice as hard as other visitors as the whole Pfarrplatz (the big place in front of our flat) is rebuilt within Second Life and re-connected to the real life. If you have a conversation in second life you can hear it from speakers within the real world. On the other hand you can watch the virtual world on several screens around the Pfarrplatz beach area.
Today I’ve quickly walked through “Marienstraße” and I will be back tomorrow to see all the cool exhibitions. It really is worth seeing. The festival will end on Sept. 11th. So there is still some time left. I’ve also been to both Pfarrplätze (in the virtual and the real world) and here are the images. Maybe we’ll meet in the next days…