The people behind Firefox are planning a big marketing push for the latest version of the open source web browser.

Firefox 1.5 is due to be available for download on 29 November, marking the end of a thriving year for the browser.

Analysts say Firefox has grabbed a 10% share of the browser market and it claims to have a core of 40-50 million dedicated users.

To serve its fans, Firefox maker Mozilla will update more regularly and take swift action on security lapses.

I’ve been using 1.5RC3 since it came out and it seems pretty cool, nearly all my extensions have updated themselves to become compatible, although there are still issues with high memory usage (Use firefox heavily for over an hour, and it doesn’t hesitate to use up at least 100megs of my pagefile…) hopefully this will be fixed with 1.5 but I remain pessimistic personally.

UPDATE: Well it’s finally out now on the ftp mirrors, though still no announcement on the Firefox website. It turns out 1.5 is exactly the same as 1.5RC3 anyway though so…I’ve had this for like 2 weeks or something. So I guess they haven’t done anything about memory usage! Ho hum.

Dunno if you’ve seen this being hyped around the net recently but it has to be said: I can’t see how this thing won’t be huge. Basically its a service that seeks to integrate many web2.0 technologies to allow you to easily download tv programs. Doesn’t sound impressive but they’re bringing together AJAX, Bittorrent, RSS, and lots of social networking things in the vein of Friendster, Myspace, Last.fm. Sounds perfect to me, check it.

In other news I got a cheque from Google Adsense the other day for $30, which reminded me that my ads have been off the site since i switched Template about a month ago. OOPS! I went back to the old template cos it has my tag cloud and the ads there and the links aren’t as broken as other one.

Obviously I’m not usually one to be bigging up marketing campaigns, but this new thing from eBay is really clever I love it. I want “IT”!

eBay has actually been really good to me in the last month, I picked up a few books I need for my uni courses for like half the price they’re supposed to be. And I’m hopefully about to win Pokemon Yellow for the Gameboy for about £4!

WOAH! This is one of the most fully fledged web based app-suites I’ve seen. It’s in Flash rather than AJAX which probably kills some of the efficiency but it seems to run pretty smoothly, apart from maybe a half second wait between loading apps. But anyway, it’s basically like a desktop. There’s an OS X-esque dock thing at the bottom from which you can load your Emails, Contacts, News Feeds, A Calendar, and even Games. The Games section is much cooler than you’d even imagine; they have Sonic!!!

I must say I’m totally impressed…

More talk here and here. Oh and you should be able to email me at anarki@goowy.com I guess… go ahead and check it out.

Haha, a story on digg.com saying Digg is better than Slashdot? Hardly surprising. I do quite like Digg, although I find a lot of the stories are pretty poorly written, there’s lots of stupid grammar and stuff… It just makes it seem a bit amateurish. But I suppose it’s better than Slashdot which has a group of editors, which may contribute to the fact that Slashdot always seems to be covering what was hot in the blogosphere yesterday…

Hehe, some gay made like a javascript so that when people viewed his profile, it automatically sent him a friend request from them, and then anyone that looked at that persons profile automatically sent a friend request… pretty soon he had about 900,000 friends! There’s some really funny writing in the article as well, and I totally hate myspace so I loved it!

A few months back, I decided to make a permanent myspace account so that I could easily view pictures of random, hot girls whenever I please without creating a new account each time. I also had a number of friends on there and figured I would see what all the hype was about. Myspace is a site for keeping up with friends, meeting new people, and even getting laid (sorry ladies, I’m taken.) It allows you to set up a profile/web page with a limited ability to make it look and feel how you wanted. Too limiting. I couldn’t even fit a good line into my “headline” without taking words out and sounding like G.W.B. trying to respond to an arbitrary question. Hell, I couldn’t even fit more than 12 glamour shots on my photos page. Like a determined Mexican with a plan, I ventured to evade these limiting borders.

I began to examine the site some more, seeing how they restrict things, what they restrict, taking some breaks to look at profiles of really hot girls, trying to add them as friends and getting rejected, and getting back to making my profile cool so that they would add me as a friend later. Chicks dig cool profiles. After a little bit of messing around, I found that I could put in a longer headline than what they allowed. Hell, I could even get around their other restrictions and get HTML in there in order to add cool “effects” to my page that other people can’t add. Yeah, that will get me chicks. Girls want guys who have computer hacking skills.

Also check out www.myspaceisgay.com hehe

There’s a proper wysiwyg editing interface, more customizable options and things…It’s cool. There’s also a drag n drop image upload feature, that looks pretty useful. And the entry text box is resizeable! This has been possible with a Firefox extension for a while but still, nice to see they’re getting on the ball. I wonder if they plan to move those features over to the installed version…? I’m pretty sure I have the latest WP installed already.

But either way I guess this is a more significant development for people who don’t want to host and administrate their own blog. I can see Wordpress.com doing well against the Blogger blogspot service, it’s way more efficient, prettier, better RSS support.

Oh yeah and here’s a link to the one I set up
http://anarki.wordpress.com/

Sounds like Morfik but the other way round? Intruiging. Crossing the boundaries between desktop applications and web apps (ajax) is going to be very important over the next few years…

Hmm, seen Scobles request to the big men at Microsoft for money to buy an upcoming Web2.0 service? He hasn’t revealed what it is, but interestingly the discussion list for the post on memorandum points to this post on the Guardian Online blog about Morfik, which is a company developing a product which “offers developers the opportunity to create web applications that run on the desktop after being unplugged from the web”.

Sounds pretty hot? Will it be in capable hands if Microsoft get hold of that though? Oh the speculation. There’s also theories that it could be Laszlo. And more discussion here

You may have noticed there have been fewer and fewer posts from myself here over the past couple of months and I’m afraid that the shortage of material reflects an inability to continue with the efforts I began here almost three years ago.

This is then, I’m sad to say, my final post as a regular blogger at Harry’s Place. I hope, possibly, to be able contribute the occasional ‘column style’ item if time allows at some stage in the future and I will remain a supporter, in whatever way I can be, of the various political initiatives I have associated with but I can no longer commit myself to the daily posts and day-to-day jousting that goes with this territory.

Just thought I’d say his insight will be missed, and I hope he finds the time to employ his skills elsewhere etc. That’s two of my favourite bloggers gone this month though! Ah well. Other people write at Harry’s Place now anyway, so the blog continues, the show goes on. My favourite recent post was one about George Galloway, Harry always had a lot to say about him and it’s (mostly) true so go read and be educated.