John Lamansky

You heard that right. According to the Supersite for Windows in their article about the Vista December 2005 CTP release, Microsoft is planning an internal release of a feature-complete version of Windows Vista later this month!

To me, this is an almost shocking announcement, since, as you probably know, Microsoft is planning to release Vista about a year from now. What will they be doing with Vista this next year? Will they actually be spending almost an entire year fixing bugs and improving the quality of the OS? If so, we are going to have a really high-quality operating system when it ships in holiday season 2006. This is becoming quite exciting.

Oh yeah, be sure to take a look at the article’s showcase of Windows Vista wallpaper too. Subject to change, of course, since the wallpaper seems to change with every major Vista preview release.

I find that rather weird. December 20 is autumn (or fall, if you will), and December 21 is winter. However, although winter weather generally starts a month earlier in Iowa, I do find that in my state winter does indeed come suddenly. (click here)

I noticed today that Google has started another one of their holiday Doodles. A Google Doodle is a series of Google logos that generally tell a story, with new logos appearing each day. Keep checking back at their Doodle #10 page to see how the Doodle progresses.

The SuperSite for Windows has some interesting articles that compare Windows Vista Beta 1 with Mac OS X “Tiger.” The site has part 1 and part 2 of the review so far. I’m looking forward to the yet-unpublished part 3, where the author will “declare a winner, of sorts, at least until we have a more feature-complete version of Windows Vista to evaluate.”

Actually, it’s 6 months and two days old (the first post was on July 15). I forgot about it on Thursday, and was very busy yesterday. But anyway, I’d just like to say, “thanks for reading everyone!” Feel free to leave comments on what you like about the blog, what you don’t like, and etcetera.

As you can tell, I am quite excited, as I have heard that it is a very good movie. I’ll let you know what I think about it.

In addition to a phishing protection extension, Google has released a “Blogger Web Comments” extension for Mozilla Firefox, which shows you what bloggers across the Internet are saying about the websites you’re visiting.

Although Google gives the impression that it’s Blogger-only, their FAQ says in question 4 that it uses Google Blog Search, meaning it supports all blogs (yippee!).

The extension puts an icon in Firefox’s status bar. When you click on it, you get a context menu:

When you click “View Comments,” it shows you a list:

A neat idea, but I haven’t discovered any interesting blogs (except mine, of course ;-)) using the extension yet.

Google released a cool new extension for Mozilla Firefox on Wednesday called “Google Safe Browsing.” It alerts you when you visit a known phishing site. A phishing site is a website designed to trick you into divulging financial or other personal information, usually for the purpose of identity theft or fraud.

Of course, if you follow basic anti-phishing rules (mainly, don’t click links in any email asking for information; type the links in manually), you should be safe from phishing threats, but this adds a nice extra level of protection.

Here’s a screenshot of what the alerts look like:

After three release candidates, Firefox 1.5 is finally released! I downloaded Firefox 1.5 and, even though I was expecting it, I was surprised to see that at first glance it looked identical to Firefox 1.0. Except for one thing I noticed right away on which I could not seem to put my finger. I finally figured out that the menu and toolbar styles were a tad different. Slight, but noticeable.

Menus and toolbars in Firefox 1.5:

And in Firefox 1.0.7:

In addition, after some browsing I realized that the Live Bookmarks icon has moved. Firefox 1.0.7 featured it in the status bar:

… While Firefox 1.5 puts it in the Location Bar (i.e. the address bar):

On a different note, several of my extensions that did work in Firefox 1.0.7 didn’t work with Firefox 1.5, but thankfully none of the incompatible extensions were used by myself very often anyway. One of them that didn’t work was a tab-reorganization extension, obviously due to the fact that tab-reorganization is now native to Firefox in version 1.5.

I’ve also noticed on a site that I made that Firefox now displays it slightly better than version 1.0.7 did. Of course, probably only I would notice this detail, since I made the site. But this is a visible sign to me that the rendering engine has undergone improvement.

If I find anything else worth noting, I’ll let you know. You can download Firefox 1.5 here.