Phil Hawthorne's Blog

Mozilla Foundation releases Firefox 5 three months after the release of Firefox 4, but is the upgrade worth it?

Mozilla, the creators of the revolution against Microsoft Internet Explorer, (please don’t tell me you’re still using the crud of a thing) released the next version of the Firefox web-browser this week: Firefox 5. For those of you who are using Firefox 3.x, you’ll find this as a massive upgrade, and a very awesome one indeed. The design is much slimmer, the menu bar is gone in favour of a chrome like “Give the web-page more screen realestate” approach. But if you’re upgrading from Firefox 4… well let’s just say I haven’t found any new features of Firefox 5 yet that I’ve used, let alone noticed.

Back in the day, new version numbers meant something. The minor bug fixes didn’t mean a product went from version 1 to version 2, no, it was more like v1.0.1. And if there were new features added in, but it wasn’t really a major upgeade to the product, then you’d get v1.1. Firefox 5, in my opinion, is more like a 4.1. But why has Mozilla taken this approach? The answer is Google Chrome.

Now before I go ahead and put my sinical hat on (perhaps it’s too late for that), I have to applaud Firefox for changing their internal processes, to have a new release verison out and stable within 3 months. Well done. But we need to get a few things in order first. Yes, you’ve done what you planned to do. But you’ve released a brand new verison of your software, which is really no different to the previous version, and yet it’s a major milestone? I don’t think so.

Recently at the WWDC in the US, Apple announced the release and some of the features for its new operating system, iOS. (continue reading…)

The other day, a friend of mine asked me for some help in trying to find out the host of a client he had just picked up. Which got me thinking,  although I would still consider myself new to the trade, I could at least post up some tools that I have used in the past, and still use today for various tasks.

Whois

When you register a domain on the internet, no matter what the extension, you need to give your contact details to your domain registrar. These details can be publicly viewed by doing a whois search on your domain. Doing a whois will allow people to know who owns the domain, and how to get in contact with them.

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