Speak­ing of Google…
I had noticed over the last couple of days that Google had star­ted pre-fetching search res­ults or rather, enabling your browser to do that. Of course this only works with newer browsers that sup­port this fea­ture (not Inter­net Explorer!). I see that the knee-jerk-reactionists over at slash­dot are pre­dict­ing death and dis­aster. Google (and Moz­illa), of course, tell you exactly how to dis­able it should you wish to do so. Mozilla’s FAQ entry is on-line too.

I also noticed this morn­ing that I am now using 246 MB (20%) of your 1243 1286 1289 1300 MB. on Gmail. That’s an unusual num­ber! I won­der where that came from. It looks sus­pi­ciously like 1000MB more than the space I was using yes­ter­day! Could they, would they, have simply added 1000MB to whatever stor­age every­one was already using? Pre­sum­ably in response to Yahoo’s decision to provide 1GB of stor­age. But they’ve not doubled They are doub­ling it like some spec­u­lated.

Update: Weird! The space avail­able keeps growing!

Update: As Serge points out in com­ments, The Gmail What’s new page now has info on this. They are doub­ling the stor­age. They’ve also announced the ‘rich­text’ sup­port I had noticed in the com­pose pane.

Found­ing mem­ber Larry Sanger has writ­ten a well con­sidered art­icle: Why Wiki­pe­dia Must Jet­tison Its Anti-Elitism over at Kuro5hin. In it he explains why, as Wiki­pe­dia hits the big time, it has to address its per­ceived lack of cred­ib­il­ity, and the dom­in­ance of dif­fi­cult people and trolls. A couple of prom­in­ent art­icles last year brought the former prob­lem into sharp relief.
He points to anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expert­ise as the root cause of the prob­lems. I have to agree with his reas­on­ing, and also his pre­dic­tion that unless it is addressed that there will be a ‘fork’ of the pro­ject with the express pur­pose of pro­du­cing a vet­ted ver­sion of the work with a tan­gible level of credibility.

Hat tip to Matt

Fire­fox 1.0 is now released!

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — November 9, 2004 — The Moz­illa Found­a­tion, a non-profit organ­iz­a­tion ded­ic­ated to pre­serving choice and pro­mot­ing innov­a­tion on the Inter­net, today announced the world­wide avail­ab­il­ity of the Moz­illa Fire­fox 1.0 web browser.

See press release for more.
Down­load it from Mozilla’s homepage. Full details are avail­able on the Fire­fox homepage.
I’m using it now and it’s great. There were couple of annoy­ing issues with the last pre release ver­sion but they are now fixed.

I may back it out later as a couple of exten­sions I use haven’t yet been updated. But then I’m not doing any­thing that requires them at this moment.

Update: In the end I didn’t back this ver­sion out, and by the end of the day had updated my exten­sions to 1.0 com­pat­ible ver­sions. Ver­dict: Get it now you won’t regret it.

I’ve just noticed Gmail now has a save as draft option. It’s appeared in the last couple of hours. It was def­in­itely some­thing I was wait­ing for. It’s another step in the right dir­ec­tion.
Other new stuff: the con­tacts have moved into the main browser win­dow rather than being a popup. They now appear more like the mail folder inter­face, though the divi­sion is purely ‘fre­quently mailed’ or all con­tacts, I think that is too crude to be use­ful, I pref­ered the alpha­betic links. There is a search which looks in the notes as well as name and email.
Another change is that the “Invite x friends to Gmail” link has dis­ap­peared back below the fold (or at least it is if you have a lot of labels). Which I think is a step backwards.

Update: The con­tact info can now include a good assort­ment of extra info like tele­phone num­bers, addresses, IM, copany, etc. And in mul­t­piple ‘sets’ like home, work, etc. Groovy. I won­der if import con­tacts will pop­u­late those new fields if they are present in the import…

Another Update:You can now do for­ward­ing! Under set­tings you can “For­ward a copy of incom­ing mail to [email­ad­dress]” and option­ally put a copy in your gmail inbox, archive or trash. And you can do it in a filter.

This will be the last for for a while, I promise…

Kevan Davis has pro­duced extisp.icio.us. Extis­pi­cious is an auto­mat­ic­ally recom­bin­ant memeplex ! Which means it pro­duces a dia­gra­matic rep­res­ent­a­tion of the vari­ous del.icio.us tags you have used.
Kevan reli­ably informs us that extis­pi­cious is an adverb Relat­ing to the inspec­tion of entrails for pro­gnost­ic­a­tion..
He also says:

But what does it all mean?
Aside from the obvi­ous keyword-quantity/font-size ratio, the rep­res­ent­a­tion isn’t very mean­ing­ful at all — tag pos­i­tion­ing is entirely random.

Here’s my my del.icio.us entrails.

After my rant about how won­der­ful del.icio.us is, I’ve now found the won­der­ful nutr.icio.us by Greg Sadet­sky.
Nutr.icio.us is an updated ver­sion of the del.icio.us pop-up post­ing form. Greg has added a list of tags includ­ing your own to the form. So you can simply click to add tags to your del.icio.us book­mark.
He has clev­erly presen­ted the most com­mon tags for that book­mark first, with the other pop­u­lar ones behind a mouse click. Finally you can click to see your own tags (with your most com­mon ones high­lighted). There are other fea­tures too.
Recom­men­ded.
A note of cau­tion: the pop-up oper­ates through Greg’s server (in order to snag the pop­u­lar tags for the book­mark) which already seems a little slower than del.icio.us. If it gets pop­u­lar that may become a problem.