Monday, March 31. 2008
March 31, 1998 is the date that Mozilla was officially launched. It’s the date the first Mozilla code became publicly available under the terms of an official open source license and a governing body for the project — the Mozilla Organization — began its public work. It’s always been known in Mozilla parlance as “3/31.” We’ll be celebrating
Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary throughout 2008. Today I want to look at our first ten years, and a bit at the next ten years.
Observing April Fools Day has become a time-honored tradition for many web companies. Much like changing your logo to celebrate holidays, pulling a fast one on your users on April 1st is something that many web services and applications have really taken to heart. But keeping creative year-after-year is tough, and some companies have learned how to consistently deliver. Below, based on past performance, is a list of the
top 10 places you can go to get fooled tomorrow.
The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which allows developers to take web applications to the desktop and store data offline, is finally coming to Linux. Adobe announced today that the pre-release alpha version of
AIR for Linux is available immediately on the Adobe Labs site. Adobe shipped the 1.0 version of AIR for Windows and Mac last month but was forced to delay the Linux release. According to a FAQ on the Adobe site, the reason for the delay was that the AIR team had to "wait on the core Flash Player's support for Linux to be finalized."
The latest release of the GNOME desktop environment includes a number of significant architectural enhancements and new applications that offer increased power and usability. Released after six months of intensive development,
GNOME 2.22 will be included in Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9, which are scheduled for release in April.
Sunday, March 30. 2008
Getting into
The Zone is almost like getting lost a good book. You’re sitting comfortably, you have your favorite beverage in hand. The house is quiet and you’re without distraction. You’re reading, the book is great, you’re engaged in the experience. Uninterrupted, you could continue like this for several hours without even noticing the progress of time - and without feeling like you’re exerting any real effort.
Saturday, March 29. 2008
WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.
Friday, March 28. 2008
Two days ago Opera reached a 100/100 pass rate on the Acid3 test for the first time and we published a screenshot on the Desktop team blog to back up the claim. I am pleased to announce the
first public build with a 100/100 pass rate and pixel-perfect rendering! The build can be downloaded here: Windows, Linux.
In our earlier Acid3 post, I mentioned that the final test we passed, test 79, was super tough. This test covered many details of SVG text layout and font support. To pass it, we had to fix many bugs. Unless you are a hardcore standards geek you may not find all these details exciting, but since we talked a bit about our other recent fixes,
I thought I’d tell the story. This subtest was originally contributed by Cameron McCormack.
Thursday, March 27. 2008
With r31342 WebKit has become the first publicly available rendering engine to achieve
100/100 on Acid3. The final test, test 79, was a brutal torture test of SVG text rendering. Details of the bugs we fixed will follow. Indeed, we found a critical bug in the test itself that would have forced a violation of the SVG 1.1 standard to pass, so until a few hours ago it was not possible to get a valid 100/100. Acid3 test editor Ian Hickson has the details.
Wednesday, March 26. 2008
I have a quick update on where we are with Acid3. Since the test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support. Today we reached a
100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly.
