Search Qoogle for video content on YouTube

Qoogle Video offers an improved search for video clips on YouTube. Result pages display 20 clips in four columns of five rows. No ads, quick display, no distractive banners. Clean pages.



Each clip result includes 3 snapshots and a link to view the clip without having to visit YouTube. My only disatisfaction with the display is that the columns are too close together, outside of that, this is a pretty fast search utility.



Returned results were very satisfactory in my opinion. And with more results to a page, I don't think that I could use YouTube search ever again.



Extras at Qoogle

They also have a Firefox plugin for Quoogle, supposedly. I think it is only good for versions prior to Firefox 2.0 -- have not checked it out yet. If anyone does, drop me a line to confirm.



The neatest feature, as if the search wasn't enough, is that they have a download utility page where you can snag the videos with. But there is also a Firefox extension called the VideoDownloader that will handle YouTube, as well as 60 plus other sites including Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Google and many, many others. This extension actually works by extracting the information from the embedded Html code -- normally you could do this by viewing the source and hand-typing the source file into your browser.



Video presentation ideas

The YouTube format is .FLV (flash video), but if you change the extension to .AVI then you can edit, take snapshots, or whatever with most video editing software. I have not tried this, but that is what I have read in a few spots.



Ideally, if you prep your videos and grab screenshots, then run them through something like Slide -- you could present your video content a little more different than the same old boring YouTube fashion. Slide has many options for displaying image clips (blinds, fades, turning pages, and those irritating MySpace slideshows too).





Technorati Tags: quoogle, youtube, video, search, slide, presentation, firefox, plugin, download

Firefox Bloat

Firefox is experiencing growing pains in more ways than one and two of the bloating problems they have encountered appear to be intertwined -- browser code and Google money. The browser war may be pushing the Firefox project too fast and down the wrong path.



Recent estimates place Firefox with a little over 15 percent of the market and Internet Explorer around 78 percent. Most of the market share that Firefox has gained on Internet Explorer came with the royalty deal that Google struck with the now for-profit Mozilla Foundation, who has 90 employees and revenue of more than $100 million in the last couple of years.

Mozilla plans to make enough money to keep growing ... Google, which, like the other search companies, is always competing for better placement on browsers. Under the agreement, the Google search page is the default home page when a user first installs Firefox, and is the default in the search bar. (Google has a similar placement with Apple’s Safari.)

The transparency of Mozilla is coming into question by many critics, mostly because of the level of secrecy that has to be maintained in its arrangements with Google. That issue caused tension around getting the deal done and disclosure.



Other critics claim that Mozilla is percieved as an extension of Google:

... they note that one of Google’s growth areas, Web-based software applications, would have a better chance of success with a browser not controlled by its biggest rival, Microsoft.

With money comes change. Firefox is evolving in directions that nobody would have imagined a couple of years ago.



The surge in popularity of Firefox has caused a backlash effect from Microsoft who is shelling more money into the advancement of Internet Explorer. The release of IE 7 shown remarkable improvements over previous versions and demonstrated to the Google/Mozilla camp exactly what they are capable of accomplishing.



When Firefox launched over five years ago, "it burst on the open-source browser scene like a young Elvis Presley -- slim, sexy and dangerous.", says Scot Gilbertson of Wired. But now he fears that with the "IE killing" release of Firefox 3.0 later this year will be in danger of becoming

the later version of Elvis -- fat.

Anecdotal reports of problems, from sluggishness to slow page loads and frequent crashes, have begun circulating in web forums, along with increasingly loud calls for Firefox to return to its roots. The alleged culprit: bloat, the same problem that once plagued Mozilla, the slow, overstuffed open-source browser spawned by Netscape that Firefox was originally meant to replace.

The "roots" was Firefox's small memory footprint, fast load time and extensibility thru plugins. It was a roll-your-own bare bones browser. It was this root that became one of Firefox's major selling points to non-geeky computer users. But now that is coming under more scrutiny as reports from reader polls cite that Firefox's mysterious habit of gobbling up huge chunks of memory as their number one complaint.

Actual data is hard to come by, but Mike Schroepfer (Mozilla's vice president of engineering) opines that memory problems can be blamed on the users environment which is influenced by other software, add-ons, and extensions. To keep the bulk down, Schroepfer's team sets a high threshold for the addition of features. New features aren't built in unless they are useful to at least 90 percent of Firefox's users.

Despite those safeguards, some now-standard features could be adversely affecting performance.

Firefox's page-cache mechanism, for example, introduced in version 1.5, stores the last eight visited pages in the computer's memory. Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use. Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer.

It is a fine line that Firefox has to walk when trying to find a balance between what is perceived to be a "needed" feature and one that is not. What is too much? And does Firefox have a choice in that matter?

Slowly but surely, Internet Explorer is catching up to Firefox. In IE7, Microsoft added tabbed browsing and integrated RSS support to its browser. If Firefox is going to continue to compete, it will need to up the ante, but it must do so without making users add extensions .. and possibly introduce compatibility problems.

With the emerging technologies appearing on the web today, it will certainly push the limits of the new breed of browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer. The change is inevitable and I do believe that neither will be going back to their roots and will continue to grow with the web.



Technorati Tags: firefox, internet, explorer, google, bloat, money, code, extensions

Did you know these basic Firefox Tips?

From the desk of CyberCapital comes three sets of Firefox tips. Some you probably already know, others not. All worth a look at.

• Basic Firefox Tips
• Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts
• Top 10 Firefox chrom Url Tricks

There are a couple other quirky entries (warning, memory intensive) Firefox Inside Firefox and Dancing Firefox. Use at your own risk !!!





Technorati Tags: firefox, tips, chrom, shortcuts, hacks

BUMPzee! Search Plugins for Firefox

After seeing Carsten Cumbrowski's search goodies for BUMPzee and they only supported Internet Explorer, I took it upon myself to write a search plugin for Firefox.

Go to my BUMPzee search plugin page which has a one-click installation regardless of what version of Firefox you are using.

Firefox 2.0 and beyond supports the new OpenSearch format, while previous versions used Sherlock. The script will detect which version you are using and install the corresponding plugin for you.

Foxkeh: The Japanese Firefox Mascot

A newly opened English version promotion of Firefox in Japan features a very popular little character named Foxkeh. The site was developed out of a response to public demand.

The website features a Foxkeh blog, wallpapers, and graphic images. The time charts of Firefox history are pretty interesting to look at, and you just have to see the Firefox videos (dubbed into English ... badly very).

All in all, it is smartly done site and apparently doing quite well in Japan.

Internet Explorer does not infect PC's -- People do

In a recent experiment, security researcher Didier Stevens bought a Google ad to test user awareness of what they were clicking on. The ad was designed to be somewhat blatantly suspect and said "Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!" and 409 people clicked on the ad.

In the six month experiment, the ad was displayed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times -- a click-through-rate of 0.16%. The Google ad campaign cost €17 ($23), or succinctly put, €0.04 ($0.06) per click to potentially compromise a machine.

Had Stevens been a real-world hacker bent on installing malware on computers thru Google AdWords, instead of a security researcher -- then the results are pretty alarming.

Equally interesting however was the relationship of browser types when the click-thru rate is compared to the market share.

According to Net Applications, Firefox now holds 15.4 percent of the browser market, while Internet Explorer has 78 percent.

Having 80.5% of the click-thrus(335) in the experiment coming from IE users is very comparable to Net Applications market share estimates.

Firefox represented 12.5% (52 click-thrus). The difference in click-thrus vs. market share for Firefox tells me that for the normal public at large, discounting the large savvy base of geeks, designers and techies who use Firefox -- the stats are saying that people are just as oblivious regardless what browser they use.

Firefox Extensions for Resizing Form Fields

If you do a lot of forum posting or blog commenting, most of it is done online with a provided textarea box from within a form. The textarea boxes are usually very tiny to post any extended length of commentary and causes you to continually scroll up, down, and even sideways just to review what you had just typed. Of course there is the "preview" option, but if there is a correction to make -- you still have to locate it inside of that miniscule box.

Enter Two Extensions to the Rescue

First there is the quick and dirty Resizeable Textarea extension which lets you resize virtually most textarea form boxes. The other, more bells, is a Resizable Form Field extension for textareas, as well as select boxes, text fields, and even iframes.

I use the Textarea only extension, and it works quite well. A little buggish at times, seems it will not work if open the form up in a new window. Another user reported the same thing, citing Gmail as an example, works well when composing in the main window, but doesn't work for the text area if you click the "open in new window" icon.

Have not tried the other flavor yet, and as of this post, there are no reviews. Asa Dotzler likes it though, even though there appears to be some abnormal behaviour with it -- such as form fields getting resized in other tabs.

Official Firefox Top 10 List ...

Yeppers. This is the Official Webware Top 10 List of lists. It was posted quite some time back by Rafe Needleman, but worth mentioning again.

The lists for About.com and Mozilla seemed to have vanished, but a pretty decent compilation of Top 10 Extension lists from Download.com, Irfan Habib, CyberNet, Simple Dollar and Moleskin . Depending on each list's slant, there should be one in there that will fit you just right.

Read/Write Web is Web 2.0 addons for Firefox, and probably the most impressive of the lot. They take a closer look at what web apps are using the browser as a platform.

The Lifehacker list was for top 10 tweaks.

And after you install all of those extensions, made all your tweaks, then you will need the Quick Online Tips list of extensions for managing ...ahem... extensions. I know I will.

Firefox Hack: Suppress New Windows

Pinder has a great tip for suppressing the target='_blank' property of anchor links which opens new windows. Apparently, the new release of Firefox advanced preferences for this no longer works, it has been overridden by a new advanced preference.



To turn it on, go to about:config and set browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs to TRUE.



Alternatively you can add user_pref('browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs', true); to your user.js file.



A new option will appear in Tools>Options>Advanced>Tab browsing. You can then force links that open in new windows to open in the current window or a new tab instead.



Pinder says that it's an experimental option for now, so it might be a little buggy, but it works for the most part.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 - 1 million Downloads on First Day?

Mozillazine is reporting that Mozilla Firefox 1.0 appears to have been downloaded over one million times on the day of its release, based on preliminary data. My emphasis on the word "appears".



This time around there were more unofficial mirror sites. Some mirrors were activated on the fly as the main servers came to an almost dead stop from the rush to download the new Firefox release. Actual totals are slowly filtering in.



I noticed that the SpreadFirefox site was shut down temporarily last night and throughout the early morning hours to reduce bandwidth and server load, you were greeted with a simple text message informing you of this.



Blog posts and information was soon released informing users of alternate download sites. One existing mirror site, and probably the best known, is CNET's Download.com. They are reporting only 33 thousand downloads over the past week, of which may include prior versions such as RC2 and RC1. Not known if this is an updated total yet, it does seem a little low.



Oddly enough two other browsers surpassed the Firefox total last week at Downloads.com, Avant garnered almost 170 thousand and Opera with a little over 100 thousand. Possibly they are getting a little more attention at Downloads.com with all of this Firefox publicity.

Bloglines Firefox Center

Bloglines has announced the addition of the Bloglines Firefox Center. The announcement is due in large part to the continuing success of Firefox and its abilities for RSS discovery.

"Over the past few months, we've watched users steadily switch away from Netscape and Internet Explorer to Firefox. Back in July, while Firefox was still in beta, it had grown to over 5% of our traffic. Today, Firefox represents 20% of requests to Bloglines."

The Bloglines Firefox Center is a one-stop shop for getting started with Firefox, RSS, and Bloglines. They created the Firefox Center to support the many Bloglines members that have switched to Firefox as their preferred browser.



From the Firefox Center you can download the latest version of Firefox, find a list of the current extensions that use Bloglines Web Services (currently two, Bloglines Toolkit and LiveLines), plus several links to learn more about Firefox.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Released

It is now official Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Released, the first major new product release since the Mozilla Suite's 1.0 in June of 2002.



Builds are available from GetFirefox.com or from the FTP server and release notes are also available.

Firefox Not Ready for School District Deployment ...

... or corporate environment either. In response to a proposal to the Snohomish School District (SDS) to mass deploy Firefox on their school's computers, the District's IT Department head fired back a few reasons why Firefox cannot be deployed on such a scale -- no guarantee of support, interoperability with other installed software, browser settings that cannot be locked, Group Policy configuration and no means for mass deployment and/or maintenance of solutions across a network.



The proposal letter was sent by someone who calls himself Spencer, a student who attends one of the schools in the District. The letter, quite frankly, was not so much a plea to the District to use Firefox, but rather a general chastising of Internet Explorer. Readers of young Spencer's post at SpreadFirefox relating his experience not only chastised MSIE, but the IT persons follow-up response as well by calling her (sometimes erroneously "him") ignorant and "brittle".



It is obvious that none of these people read SpreadFirefox's call to enlighten, rather than enter into this mudslinging type of schoolhouse debate. This will not win over any supporters, but will probably have the opposite affect when it comes to School Districts -- they do not do feasibility studies all that often -- and this District (Snohomish) will not be looking at Firefox for quite some time now.



Ironically, young Spencer would have had a better chance at convincing the District to the South of him in Seattle. While this District is much larger, it operates in a dissimilar fashion. Each School within this District is independently Administered. While SSD has a centralized IT Department, the schools have more power over what goes into them and can over-ride their decisions when it comes to the labs themselves. Here is another tip, the IT Department installs Netscape as a default browser, if and when they do get involved with physical installations.



SpreadFirefox's mission to spread the word about Firefox, IMO, should rein in these types of ill-targeted stabs in the dark. You give one IT head a negative impression and that will spread quickly from one District to the next. These people communicate with each other across District lines almost on a daily basis. You are going to need a more coordinated effort to crack these nuts. Each District is different and will require multiple gameplans too.

Firefox RC2 Builds Available

In preparation for the official November 9th release of Firefox 1.0, RC2 builds are now available.

Send Firefox to your Desktop

A mozillaZine member, wig_out_on_me, offers up a Windows Registry file that will create a Desktop namespace for Firefox similar to the way Internet Explorer, My Computer and the Recycle Bin shortcuts are set up. This namespace provides for a context menu with Profile Manager, Safe Mode, etc. included on it. Any shortcuts created from this namespace will retain the added context menu items which is handy for the Quick Launch toolbar.





VIA: Gemal's Psyched Blog

Firefox 1.0 RC 1 Released

From MozillaZine Talkback:

"'Today we have our first Firefox 1.0 candidate builds available for testing. You can get these test builds from FTP. If you've already downloaded 1.0 PR (the 'feature complete' preview) and you're not really interested in testing and bug reporting, then you should probably stick with 1.0 PR for a couple more weeks and upgrade when we release the official Firefox 1.0.



The release candidates include about 250 bug fixes since Firefox 1.0 PR and we'd appreciate any feedback around any of those areas. With this release, we're also featuring Mozilla Foundation builds for up to two dozen locales (slowly trickling in. if you don't see your language, try back in a bit.) If you do find regressions from the Preview Release, please file bugs in Bugzilla and nominate them as Firefox 1.0 blockers using the 'blocking-aviary1.0?' flag on the bug. Thanks for your help in testing Firefox!'"

The Release Candidate is about one week behind schedule, as mentioned in the Firefox Roadmap, but they have accomplished one of their goals in reducing The List. There are just a handful that remain and those are newly discovered bugs in the software.



They are not too much in want for testers either. Last glance at the tally, there have been over 6.5 million downloads of Firefox Preview to date.

Firefox Reaches Goal for NY Times Ad Campaign

Firefox advocates' call for donations to pay for an advertisement in The New York Times has more than reached its target , and only three days into the campaign.



The campaign, run by Spread Firefox volunteers, started Tuesday to raise money to place a full-page ad for the launch of the open-source browser in The New York Times. The goal was to get 2,500 people to donate $30 or more to the marketing fund within 10 days, or before the official release of Firefox 1.0 on Nov. 9.



The Firefox Release 1.0 is a landmark moment in the browser wars. "This is Mozilla’s most important release ever," says Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Firefox. "We have an opportunity to take market share from Microsoft. This is as good a chance as ever existed." And the fact that its fans are paying for a full-page ad in the New York Times calling attention to the product will likely result in a few more stories such as this.

Mozilla / Firefox / Camino Tabbed Browsing Vulnerabilities

In a Secunia Advisory they have discovered two vulnerabilities in Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, and Camino, which can be exploited by malicious web sites to obtain sensitive information and spoof dialog boxes.



1) Inactive tabs can launch dialog boxes so they appear to be displayed by a web site in another tab. This can be exploited by a malicious web site to show a dialog box, which seems to originate from a trusted web site.



2) Inactive tabs can gain focus from form fields on web sites in another tab. This can potentially be exploited to collect sensitive data entered in form fields on other web sites.



Secunia's solution is don't visit trusted web sites while visiting untrusted web sites or disable JavaScript.



Mozilla apparantly have been aware of this vulnerability since October 4th. It has now just been made public.



The form focus tab flaw (the second issue) was fixed on the Aviary branch (1.0 releases of Firefox and Thunderbird) and the 1.7 branch on October 6th. The fix is more of a workaround than a proper solution. The first issue is still open.



You can test for vulnerablities by visiting the Secunia Advisory page.