Sperrobjekt Weblogsince 2003

I just installed the recent beta 4 release of Firefox 3 (Firefox Portable, to be exact, thus making it run alongside my trusty Firefox 2). Firefox 3 is blazing fast, but this may be due to the fact that I've got almost no add-ons installed. My Firefox 2 has to carry the burden of 27 active extensions that may or may not slow down the whole applicaton, who knows. All in all, Firefox 3 seems to be very stable already, but I need my add-ons for web development and so on. That's why I've been looking for other things to do with the new beta. When I found out that Mozilla Labs released a new version of Prism, their stand-alone XULRunner applicication slash Site Specific Browser. If you install Prism 0.2 as add-on to Firefox 3, it allows you to create and export new applicatons from within the browser. The new apps then use the browser's rendering enginge, it seems (I'm not exactly sure how it works). Yet, again, the resulting app feels considerably faster than the old Prism. I'm using an installation of tt-rss on my server as web based feed reader. Now that it's running as a Prism app, it seems to respond so much faster than before - which reduces the amount of time I need to read all my feeds. Great!

Several sources report that Microsoft will add microformats support to the next version of their internet browser, IE8. The corresponding IEBlog entry doesn't mention microformats, though, so this news still needs confirmation. Anyway, it would be great if microformats gained support from the two major browsers. The upcoming Firefox 3 "Gran Paradiso" will also support microformats, but there is still a discussion going on how microformats will eventually be displayed (sidebar, layers, icons).

Andy Mabbett recently added the geo microformat to Wikipedia's template system. Consequently, all Wikipedia pages that are based on this template do from now on contain geo. What's the benefit of all this? You might, for example, use the Operator or Webcards Firefox extensions to find a place in Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps with a single click. Other applications may parse a Wikipedia article and process the metadata in other ways. Examples: List of impact craters on Earth, Hamstead railway station.

Andy is a member of the WikiProject Microformats, a group of users who want to actively promote the use of microformats in the world's greates encyclopedia. Great job!