China Channel Firefox Addon: Experience Internet Censorship
October 27, 2008 by InF, under Firefox, Others, Software, Tech Posts.
I’ve seen my fair share of Firefox addons. There are addons that can make your browser do virtually anything, including controlling your music player from your browser if you wish, or get live weather info, or draw diagrams, or… or anything else I can’t think of.
Today, however, I encountered an addon in my feeds that I found particularly interesting. It’s called the China Channel Addon.
What does it do? It gives you a taste of what it means to surf the Internet in China.
As you probably know, the Great Chinese Firewall (or Golden Firewall) is used to censor the Chinese Internet and prevent people from looking up subjects like “Free Tibet”. I guess they just get a “Page cannot be found” or “Error 404″ or possibly very long wait times with no page displayed at the end.
Well, this addon recreates this effect. It places you behind the Great Firewall, and allows you to see what Internet Censorship means.
Personally, I don’t find any day-to-day use to this addon. It’s just a curiosity I wanted to share with you.
Now, if ever you are preparing a project or paper on Internet censorship or something like that, you may want to experience this effect first hand, and the China Channel Addon is what you will need.
Any other interesting Firefox Addons you would like to share?
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Firefox 3 Final: The Review
June 18, 2008 by InF, under Firefox, Reviews, Software.
Firefox 3.0 Final has just been released today, 17th June 2008 (it’s already 18th in some countries though), and I already downloaded my copy to help establish the Firefox World Record. Now that it is installed and ready to work, I am going to review it. I’ve been using Firefox since the early 1.x versions, and I kind of saw its evolution. If I could resume Firefox 3, it would be “Shiny Search Boxes”, with respect to the glass buttons and the large number of new search boxes scattered everywhere.
Without much delay, on with the review. But first, you might consider getting your own copy here, and help with the World Record initiative (you need to download from the official mirrors of Firefox, else the download does not count!). Beware though. Some of the pages of the Mozilla website have yet to be updated, and are still showing Firefox 2.0 downloads. Also, the page is taking a significant time to load, probably considering that lots of people are currently downloading.
A word of warning. Before installing Firefox 3, make sure all your add-ons are compatible with the new Firefox. A number of my add-ons are not yet compatible with the Firefox 3 Final. Specially Tabmix Plus, which is not yet compatible. Even Unplug is not yet compatible, according to the default install. So, check beforehand, or simply backup your Firefox profile before upgrading, in case you want to revert. As you can see below, some of my extensions are not compatible with Firefox 3.0. Unfortunately, you will have to check manually via the Mozilla Addons site.
To backup your Firefox profile, you could use the FEBE extension (cross-platform) (doesn’t work with Firefox 3 Final yet), or you could use the MozBackup (Windows only) application. More info about manual profile backup is available from Mozilla, here.
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Firefox 3 Prowls, the Blue E Shudders!
March 26, 2008 by InF, under Tech News.
Firefox 3 is about to be released from Beta (it’s STILL in Beta), and will soon be available for grabs by the general public, with an estimated final version release date of June 2008.
Firefox 3 boasts about increased stability, much less memory consumption, a better user interface, more personalisation and my personal guess, revamped security.
Firefox users do know that the fox is a hungry b*****d that eats memory. You’ll usually see FFox eating as much as 110MB in your task manager, after you have around 5-6 tabs open, and having browsed for around 2 hours. Add in some add-ons and it’ll even climb further. It takes as much memory as those year 1999 “high-end” PC games!
But what I do know is that, seeing the success FFox has enjoyed since now, I predict a massive download rush in June. I dunno yet what IE has in stock, but it better take out the big guns to counter the Firefox 3 wave that’s about to take over the Internets! 
Remember? Firefox got 5.6 million downloads in the first 2 weeks, and has topped the 25 million downloads mark just after?
Downloads of Firefox 1.0 had reached 25.24 million as of Friday, just over 100 days since its release, according to the Mozilla Foundation, developers of the browser. A preview release of Firefox 1.1 is scheduled for April.
(source)
Well, the browser wars just turned a lot lot hotter!
OMFG! I just found out that Firefox tops 500 millions download mark! WTF! Source!!
