Agronesia

My internet quota is limited so any way to cut down useless usage is helpful. If we talk about flash, there are some websites that genuinely use it for advanced functionality like Wordpress‘ stats system and Google Analytics. However many just use it for bad design and nonessential content which just waste bandwidth.

This is where add-ons like Flashblock comes to play. It lives up to its name: the Mozilla Firefox extension will block flash and replace it with an “f” icon (meaning “**** you” presumably). If we really need the flash content, we can just click on the placeholder.

There’s a whitelist feature which is useful because as I said some websites use flash properly and need it to function. Even the uploader in Wordpress uses flash.

We did it :).

In total 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 on the designated download day and it has now hold the world record for the most software downloaded in a day :).

But frankly I kinda hate FF3, it hangs when it loads Java… \(O.o)/

Anyway, you can see the download statistics presented in a Flash map here.

It’s interesting, the tiny country Singapore got 129,957 downloads, almost rivaling this giant country of nothing Indonesia which only gets 143,283. Japan did more than 1.3 million downloads.

The Indonesian ISP business have lots of room to grow assuming all areas will reach the internet usage density of Singapore, Japan, and the likes… Let’s not just become a nation of farmers, but a nation of Linux-using internet-savvy farmers!

I’ve downloaded the shiny brand new Firefox 3! Go download it yourself, and to celebrate it try to do these things:

1. Play JavaScript Mario

The classic scrolling game, but now using JavaScript! It isn’t faithful to the original in that we can go backwards though. Play!

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Starting from June 17, 10 a.m PDT, or June 18 in Indonesia, we can download Firefox 3 final! I’m running its latest RC right now, and will of course download it as soon as it becomes available.

They are aiming to be the most software downloaded in 24 hours, and that’s partly the reason I’m hyping it. You can actually pledge to download Firefox, and 1.5 million people have actually pledged. It’s a shame that while Indonesia has almost 2 times the population of Japan, Japan has almost 9 times people pledging! This shows how primitive, or how free-software-apathetic, the Indonesian culture is.

So, don’t forget to do it tomorrow. (I wonder whether their servers can handle the load)

My memory usage was soaring past 1.5 GB, so I closed the main culprit, a Firefox 3 RC2 with 20+ tabs opened. As usual, I thought it was time to restarts other programs as well.

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