While fiddling around with my style sheets this morning, I discovered this web page which will allow you to calculate the right font-size-adjust value to specify in CSS for any locally-installed font, although I think the page only works with Firefox at the moment.

Iceweasel has (finally) replaced Firefox in Debian unstable, not that the differences—beyond the 1.5 → 2.0 transition, which happened at the same time—are all that noticeable.

Firefox’s software update feature doesn’t seem to be finding it yet (at least on my box where I’m running a 1.0.4 release candidate), so download it here. (þ: Asa Dotzler)

If you run Mozilla Firefox, you probably want to upgrade to a 1.0.4 candidate build to fix the arbitrary code execution vulnerability discussed at OTB and elsewhere.

Mike Hollihan recommends Quick Note for Firefox, a “post-it note” tool that works from the right-click menu and includes the URL of the page you’re visiting, and it does look very nifty… particularly when trying to compose a post that references more than web page.

Meanwhile, those of you who can’t remember whether or not Godfather actor Abe Vigoda is still alive may find this extension helpful (þ: Ryan at the DPS). Quick Note seems more useful, though.

Somehow a number of websites appear to be able to reset my Mozilla Firefox prefs to allow pop-ups… they don’t just pop-up a window, but they actually reset my “block pop-up windows” setting. Has anyone else seen this?

Check here for recent FireFox extensions. Tested the Gmail extension and it works fine on a Mac.

I’ve added Dean Edwards’ IE7 hack to the blog on a quasi-experimental basis; the good news is that it fixes a lot of Internet Explorer’s rendering bugs, while the bad news is that it seems to introduce some quirks of its own and exposes IE’s lousy fallback behavior for missing Unicode characters. My general advice for IE users is to download and use Mozilla Firefox instead.

Cool Mozilla Firefox extension of the day (at least for Windows): ForecastFox. Under Linux, the GNOME Weather applet is more generally useful, although ForecastFox has the advantage of taking up otherwise-useless space in the Firefox status bar.

I just downloaded Mozilla Firefox 1.0 PR, and like BigJim I’m liking the new Live Bookmarks feature immensely—it reminds me a bit of the approach David Janes took with BlogMatrix Jäger, but the Mozilla approach is significantly less featureful (for starters, I can’t see any way to go to the root URL specified by a feed, and it doesn’t keep track of what you’ve read in any way that I can tell; nor does there seem to be a way to add a RSS feed without a LINK element—so I can’t add the Chronicle of Higher Ed feeds). On the other hand, it’s integrated in the browser nicely, and you can put a folder of feeds in your Bookmarks Toolbar, and use the menu to surf posts seamlessly (so it doesn’t take up real estate when you’re reading), or you can open the “Live Bookmarks” in the sidebar. And it does have Atom support, which is nice. So, for now, I’ll give it 3 out of 5 stars.

In other changes, it looks like Gtk theming has changed slightly yet again, and apparently the “disappearing cookie” bug has been somewhat, but not totally, squished. And it does seem a little more zippy than 0.9.3 did on my Linux box (though that could just be due to the Mozilla.org builds being i686 builds, as opposed to Debian policy-compliant i386 builds). So it seems like a worthwhile upgrade.

Both Chelle and Steven Taylor have come to know the bliss that is Mozilla Firefox.

Apparently unsatisfied with wasting taxpayer dollars by insulting our intelligence with TV advertising, the Federal Drug Warriors are now planning to annoy the hell out of internet users in their quest for a drug-free America:

[ Drug Enforcement Administrator Karen]Tandy said the DEA plans online educational initiatives including Internet versions of Public Service Announcements and pop-up ads that will appear on the computer screens of individuals searching the Internet for drugs.

All the more reason to use Mozilla Firefox. You can block pop-ups and stick it to the Man!

Oh, goody, YAFNC. The browser that changes its name every season is now at 0.8. Download it early and often. No word yet on whether Clint Eastwood plans to sue.

Now off to dig through some SQL tables to rename this topic of the blog…

Via Mark: advice on how to make Mozilla Firebird feel and behave faster.

You know the drill; it’s here. This is the first day in a while the build hasn’t had completely broken bookmarks. It looks very spiffy with some of the new Gtk2 SVG-based themes.

Yet another Phoenix build for Linux (Intel 32-bit), although now it’s been renamed Firebird™. Download it here; as with previous builds, it is built with Xft and the Gtk 2.x toolkit and (optional) Xprint support. As always, you’ll probably need Debian unstable or something else very recent for it to run properly.

If you want to build your own copy from CVS, this .mozconfig file may be helpful. If you want to optimize it for your particular system, you’ll probably want to change the -mcpu=athlon to -march=whatever, but that may stop it from running on other CPUs.

I‘ve produced a new Phoenix build for Linux. This build adds support for the Xprint extension, which substantially improves printing under Linux. Download it here in bzip2 format. Like the earlier builds, it also supports the Xft font renderer (which allows subpixel rendering, similar to Microsoft's “ClearType”, for LCD screens) and is built against Gtk 2.0.

I've built a new build of Phoenix with Xft enabled for Linux; unlike previous builds, it's based on GNOME 2 and built with gcc 3.2.3, so it probably won't run except on a very recent system (like Debian unstable). Download it here.

It looks like everyone's favorite lightweight browser has hit the 0.5 release; get it here (a lightly tested Linux build with Xft for all your antialiasing needs; for Windows, grab a build from here). Don't forget to visit the official and unofficial sites to pick up your favorite extensions and themes (still using Qute here).

Get it here; it seems to be relatively stable. Hopefully it leaks memory less than 20021119 did...

I've hacked together a Xft-enabled Phoenix build from a nightly Mozilla build and a nightly Phoenix build; you can download it here. It seems to run well under Debian unstable; it should also run OK in Red Hat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.

If you want to roll your own, see the unofficial Phoenix FAQ for details. That site also has extensions and themes that work with Phoenix; I'm enjoying the Qute theme, myself.