Firefox has taken off on home computers as the second most popular browser, and it’s looking very promising for open source, Mozilla and, more widely, non-MS software.

In fact, it supposedly has around an 11% global market share now, which is great news.

The next thing that needs to be tackled, however, is getting Firefox into the enterprise sector, and getting more and more businesses to roll it out. And before that can happen, Firefox needs:

• An MSI installer for Windows, to make it easy for Windows administrators to roll it out across all desktops instead of running exes manually on each workstation.
• Integration with Microsoft Active Directory, and respect for AD policies, like IE has now. It’s far too much to configure hundreds of installations of Firefox manually. Many corporate environments utilise proxy servers and other network setups, and there needs to be a way to get this configured centrally via AD or similar and rolled out to all FF installations.

If this happens, sysadmins are much more likely to choose Firefox for security reasons, and if it becomes as easy to manage remotely as IE is now, Firefox 3.0 will hopefully be a winner.

I’m not saying the personal sector isn’t important though – we still need to keep pushing Firefox to the average PC user and marketing it.

The success of Firefox could also prove vital for FOSS becoming mainstream in the future. If people use Firefox and have a good experience with it, they then associate open source with good user experience and being a good product. If that happens, we’re much more likely to see FOSS becoming more mainstream, which is good. Best of all, it keeps the traditional software companies on their toes and making good, well-priced products. 🙂

I got IE3 under Windows 95 to display my site. But I didn’t stop there.

After a quick trip around the web to find a copy of IE 5.5 SP2 (the last IE for Windows 95), I manage to grab it and get it installed on Windows 95. Not only does this modernise the browser a touch, but it also installs various DLLs we’ll need to run a much better browser. 🙂

Thumbnails are clickable to enlarge, by the way.

Now we have IE 5.5, albeit at a rather bad 16 colours (not 16-bit colour, 16 different colours).

After an install of VMware Tools, we have the drivers to ramp up the colour depth to a respectable 65,536 different colours (that’s 16-bit colour).

A quick run of Windows Update to apply some security updates from, hmmm, looks like 1999. 😀

And finally, we install Firefox 1.5.0.9 (it crashes on first run, but a reboot and relaunch and it works perfectly). Finally, a decent browser.

Unfortunately, Firefox 2.0.x apparently doesn’t want to work with Windows 95 anymore.

Great fun – and I couldn’t have done it without this guide.

Oh the joys of VMware and a copy of Windows 95. The picture says it all.

So, Vista hit the shelves yesterday. Now, anyone that knows me even a little bit will know that I sometimes indulge in a little healthy Microsoft bashing now and then, but today I’m going to try and be balanced.

I could rant on and on about how Vista is good, and at the same time how it’s bad, but for now I’m just going to share with you three of the things I like and three things I don’t like about Microsoft’s new release. Bear in mind that the last version I used was Release Candidate 1 and not the final version, so some of what I say might be out-of-date or based on the pre-release version.

» Read the rest of this post…

FireBug is an awesome Firefox extension for web developers.

The FireBug developers have just put out a 1.0 release and it includes loads of cool features. There’s one that I just have to share, though, and it is awesome.

If you use inspect to select an element on the page, you can then double-click on bits of the CSS in the right hand pane, and get this, edit them in real time! That means you can literally play around with how a website looks in real time and it’s really useful when you want to make a CSS tweak to something. You just use FireBug to preview it in real time and adjust your edits to make it just right, then you can tweak the actual file. No page reloading needed (or worse Ctrl-F5 to clear the cache).

Download and install it from the official Mozilla add-ons page.

From InformationWeek:

Running Windows Vista’s new Aero graphical interface doesn’t impact PC performance, a study sponsored by Microsoft claims.

According to speed measurements of more than 60 common business chores, which were conducted by North Carolina-based Principled Technologies for Microsoft, using the Aero interface “had little or no negative effect on Windows Vista’s performance.”

Rule number one is never believe the results of any study ‘sponsored’ by any company/organisation with any interest whatsoever in the results. Even not-for-profits like Mozilla. Only independent studies. Bias sucks.

Don’t believe this. Or any other ‘sponsored’ study.

Mozilla have released Firefox 2.0.0.1, which contains some important security updates and a couple of other fixes, plus official support for Vista (it worked fine in RC1 for me anyway, but now it’s officially supported).

To upgrade, go to Help > Check for updates (running as an administrator) and restart the browser when it’s done.

Following up from my post about the leaked Royale Noir theme, I’ve been told that Microsoft’s Zune theme for Windows XP is essentially the evolution of this theme.

It’s pretty nice actually and feels much more ‘finished’ than the Royale Noir theme. It’s now running on my Windows desktop.

Download it from Microsoft here.

ZuneTheme Hosted on Zooomr

Thanks for the tip, Adam.

Up until a couple of days ago I still hadn’t tried out Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 which I downloaded a long time ago. Unfortunately, I discovered that the ethernet driver for VMware doesn’t work (and it used to in Beta 2), and so I was forced to wait until a convenient moment to install it on a physical machine (which wasn’t going to be my main desktop, funnily enough).

Windows Vista’s installer is still pathetically fussy about where it will allow you to install Vista. It requires installation to the first primary partition on a hard drive which is master.

Well, that’s really convenient, considering that my partition layout on the first hard drive on this machine was as follows:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1912    15358108+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2            1913        1988      610470   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4            3009        4870    14956515    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            4054        4870     6562521   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3009        4053     8393899+  83  Linux

hda1 was my CentOS server installation, hda5 was a few gigs of data left over from somewhere else, and hda6 was my Ubuntu Dapper installation. Of course, the Windows install required the monopoly on hda1, which currently was occupied.

Well, thank goodness for the flexibility of Linux. I simply used the low level tool dd to make images of all the partitions (onto a spare 160 GB drive also in that machine), and then wiped off the disk.

One Vista install later, and the drive now had just one primary partition of rougly 17 GB with Vista on it.

I then created a partition to match the size of the CentOS install, and dd‘d the image back. After tweaking a few configuration files via the Ubuntu Live distro, I then rebooted with my GRUB bootloader CD in the drive, typed in the boot commands and CentOS booted like nothing had happened. 🙂

I then reinstalled GRUB to the hard drive (with a boot menu obviously, I don’t type boot commands every boot!) and added Vista to the list of OSs to boot.

The Ubuntu Dapper partition unfortunately would no longer fit (by about 2 GB), as Vista is now using a lot of the space, but instead I installed Edgy, and I’ll recover the important files off Dapper when I need them.

So after about half a day of partition shuffling, it now looks like:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        2040    16384000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            2040        4870    22733220    5  Extended
/dev/hda5            2040        3952    15359384+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3953        3985      265041   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7            3986        4870     7108731   83  Linux

hda1 is now Vista (NTFS), hda5 is CentOS, hda6 is Linux swap (for both) and hda7 is Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

The things I do to test Vista…

If anyone wants to use BoxCheck (a Firefox extension that allows you to shift-click to select multiple tick boxes on web forms) on Firefox 2.0, I’ve updated it to make it compatible.

Note that this is hacked – all I’ve done is change the supported versions in the script to work with 2.0. It works for me, but if it eats your Firefox, don’t come complaining (execute FF with -safe-mode to remove it if it kills it).

You will have to add me to the list of allowed sites to install software, but don’t worry, it’s pure BoxCheck just with a hacked install file (you can verify for yourself, just Save Target As the .xpi, rename to .zip and explore it).

Tutorial on how to hack your favourite FF 1.5.x extensions to work with FF 2.0 coming soon.