The Chris Gonyea Project

Looks like doron is working on a really cool Gmail extension for Mozilla.

Gmail is becoming better by the moment because of these 3rd pary add-ons. Awsome stuff.

Looks like Microsoft wasn’t going to stay behind the pack in the free e-mail wars for long. Hotmail has announced that it will now offer 250MB of free storage right away and will offer 2GB if you pay your soul to them. The storage bump will begin in early July.

So by my count, the three major e-mail providers now offer:
GMail: 1GB free, no paid storage (yet)
Yahoo Mail: 100MB free, 2GB paid
Hotmail: 250MB free, 2GB paid

Looks like Yahoo and Hotmail did what they hope was a “just enough” upgrade that it won’t lose any users to Gmail, despite the massive differences in storage sizes compared to Gmail. You must remember, Gmail’s appearance caught everyone off-guard (remember that everyone at first thought it was one of Google’s famous April Fools jokes?). Google’s infrastructure is very scalable, apparently Yahoo’s and Hotmail’s isn’t as easily to expand as they first had to figure out how to answer Gmail, then upped their storage limits “just enough” so they won’t lose customers (their hope), but well short of Gmail.

Interesting though that Hotmail, long the e-mail provider with the smallest storage space (2MB!!!) is now a 150MB more then Yahoo Mail. I would not be surprised if Yahoo ups its storage a little more because of this. Also expect the free e-mail wars to heat up if Gmail really catches on. I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo and Hotmail jump their storage capacities up more, especially when Gmail is opened to the public.

Thanks but no thanks Yahoo and Microsoft, I’ll stick with Gmail.

Oh and I have invitations if anyone wants any

Asa of the Mozilla Foundation has revealed some very interesting screenshots of new enhancements that will appear in future Mozilla Firefox versions.

The first one is of the Firefox secure site notification UI. Right now, if you visit a secure site in Firefox (or for that matter, any web browser that I can think of), a small lock appears in the bottom corner of your browser window, which 99% of web users probably never notice nor care about.

So going with the theme that Firefox is a 1000x more secure and reliable then public enemy #1, this is the new improved secure site notification UI:

As you can tell, the security lock now appears right on the address bar instead of stuffed in the bottom corner of the screen.

Few comments on this: wondefully done. Very noticable, not in your way, and easy to fgure out. The only concern I have is that with Javascript the address bar could be turned off. That is, it can be turned off at the moment. I have a feeling that in the near future Firefox will prevent certain toolbars like the address bar from being turned off by web sites.

Next screenshot of a UI change: the bookmarks manager.

Looks like bookmarks are going to be much much easier to organize. Without actually using it (right now, all I have seen is this screenshot) and relying on what Asa says, it sounds like a small but great improvement in bookmark management.

I might have to ditch this 0.9 release and upgrade to a nightly build. I love these changes.

Been extremely busy lately. Will post some stuff tonight that I have been thinking about.

Wil Wheaton and company move fast. Go to Gmail4troops.com if you wish to donate your Gmail invites to those serving your country.