Keith Rowland

Well the storm is over and over 8 million of you have the Firefox 3 browser. I thought I would post a description of my favorite features. Of course they are just a few of the many features that I could mention. Let's go....

1. Full-Screen Mode: Pressing F11 on Windows and Linux will get you a full screen of browser content. It removes all the browser "chrome" and just displays the web site. On my little small screen Sony with a 10.4 inch screen, it comes as a welcome feature. Of course Windows IE users have had this feature for some time, but I now have a new appreciation of the feature on my Linux based Sony.

2. zoom, ZooM, ZOOM: The Zoom feature in FF3 is not just a font size enlarger, it now zooms in the entire site, images and all. It's a better way to zoom in when you just have tired eyes or want to use your full width screen to read the site. The best part, FF3 remembers what level of zoom you used the last time you were at the site and it sets the zoom level. Now those fixed width sites that are only filling up part of my screen can be made to use the full width of my browser window AND remember the setting for the future return trips to the site.

3. Shared Bookmarks: This feature is really a Firefox Extension from Del.icio.us, now owned by Yahoo. I have used Delicious in the past, but only in its first version, which was a site to post your bookmarks to and share them with friends. You could go to your Delicious page and then click to your favorite sites from there. Now with FF3 and Yahoo's new release of what I will call the Web2/FF3 version of the extension, you can sync your bookmarks to all your computers. The FF plug-in adds functionality to the browser to manage, sync and browse to your Delicious bookmarks directly from the browser without going back to the Delicious website. Since Google dropped support of their Google Browser Sync for FF, this is a welcome replacement.

Alternatives: To be fair, I know I sang the praises of Google Bookmarks last month, but that process required me to keep the iGoogle homepage (with Google Bookmarks gadget installed) nearby in Safari. I loaded the Google Toolbar for FF and am able to get and keep my bookmarks sync'ed using FF, but I could not find an easy way to share or publish those bookmarks like with the robust features of Delicious. Oh, by the way, notice on the left side of the page under Posting Topics an item called Cool and Del.icio.us, I'm able to pull certain tagged bookmarks and display them from Del.icio.us right here on my site. I couldn't find a way for Google Bookmarks to do that.

There is another bookmark syncing extension called FoxMarks, which you could look into also.

Related Sites:

www.getfirefox.com
www.delicious.com
www.toolbar.google.com
www.foxmarks.com
www.keithrowland.com/cool

Well today is the last day for Windows-XP as Microsoft is trying again to stop the XP train and jump on the Vista train wreck. While MS will still offer a slim version of XP for those mini-notebooks, this old Sony mini-notebook user is switching to Linux.

Last weekend I wiped off WIndows-XP from my Sony Vaio PCG-SRX87 850 MHZ Pentium notebook and installed the openSUSE 10.3 Linux distribution. It still takes a geek to load it up from scratch, but if a computer came already pre-installed with Linux, I'd say it would be a great alternative to sticking with XP. Certainly my lowly Sony couldn't run VIsta, but hey, with Linux, it's another whole generation of use.

I've always liked and used Linux for my servers, but the desktop was always short of what I could get with Mac OS-X or XP. The lack of support for some of the weird peripherals in notebooks made it a challenge even for the best of us geeks. So I was amazed at the advancement that Linux offers today on the desktop front.

openSUSE with all its great support from software developers and corporate vendors is beginning to be a rather worthy contender for my notebook. The problem areas in notebooks are usually the LCD video display, the sound chips, power management, modems and wifi interfaces. I was very happily impressed that openSUSE (and I'm sure other distros for that matter) recognized the video display and was able to use it in it's native mode. It recognized and ran with the outboard firewire DVD/CD drive, worked with the ethernet and sound interfaces and most of all the internal WiFi device.

Even things like hibernate, battery monitoring and automatic HotSpot connecting worked. However not everything works, I can't get the hot keys to work for setting the screen brightness or volume, but there are options within the OS itself to set those.

So now with the newest Firefox 3 officially coming out tomorrow, I'm going to live in a Linux notebook for the time being. I still use a Mac with OS-X as my desktop web development system and still have a Mac G4 notebook, but for the coffee shop circuit, the little Sony with Linux goes a long way towards making up for the loss of MS XP.

It works great for web browsing, e-mail, podcast listening and maintaining a web blog like this one.

Related Sites:

www.opensuse.org
www.spreadfirefox.com
www.starbucks.com
www.apple.com/mac/

Lindsey Williams talks about his first hand knowledge of Alaskan oil reserves larger than any on earth. And he talks about how the oil companies and U.S. government won't send it through the pipeline for U.S. citizens to use.

This was taped in October 2007 when he predicted gasoline would be over $4 a gallon in the short future. Well here we are.