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Mozilla has released the second alpha of Fennec, their mobile browser. There’s a short but sweet overview of Fennec on Vimeo which is worth checking out.

I think almost regardless of it’s performance improvements the real game-changing potential here is the inevitable swathe of add-ons and extensions that will be, and in some cases such as NoScript already are, available.

I don’t think that any web developer who has used it would want to go back to a world without Firebug and I also think that it’s influence on WebKit‘s developer tools is fairly clear to see.

So I really hope that support for Fennec spreads beyond the Nokia 810 soon, and that it’s as instrumental as Firefox was in re-igniting browser development, especially from a developer-tool perspective.

Kuro5hin has a brilliant, if lazy, eulogy for George Carlin – who would undoubtedly have loved it.

Pope John Paul II George Carlin embraced the harsh realities of suffering head-on, and showed that they are an integral and unavoidable part of our pilgrimage here on earth, not to be feared but to be accepted willingly and even joyfully as the inevitable conditions for entrance into eternal life dumb.

Now that Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is out, I’ve decided to give it a proper trial.

I had tried running Firefox 2 and 3 in parallel on my macbook, but found that 3 would always try and become the default browser, which annoyed me enough to get rid of it. Now though I’ve gone the whole hog and, while I do have FF 2 hanging around, I’m using 3 full time. The upshot is that I’ve been poking around at what extensions are available for average everyday webmonkey (btw – did you see that webmonkey is back?) and have been updated to work with FF 3 RC 1. Here’s my current list of installed extensions.

Update: 7th May 2008: these all work for Firefox 3 RC 2

AdBlock Plus

A pre-requisite for surfing the public web. Ads are so 20th century!

ColorZilla

Advanced Eye Dropper, Colour Picker and more. Brilliant stuff.

Delicious Bookmarks

Plugs your browser nicely into your delicious account.

Firebug 1.2 Beta

Indispensable. Nuff said.

Googlebar Lite

Ahhh, so much nicer than the big G’s own attempt.

Scrapbook

Sort of like your bookmarks, but actually saves the pages down to your hard drive for offline viewing. You can edit-before-capture and even spider whole sites (or sections thereof). Really quite nice.

TamperData

TamperData is to HTTP what Firebug is to the DOM.

Web Developer Toolbar

An oldie but a VERY goodie! Manage CSS, find stuff and another hot tip – until MeasureIt is updated for FF 3, it also has it’s own ruler system (in the Miscellaneous menu).

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting but not exactly deeply thought-out piece on Link Journalism. I think the point they miss is to question how much journalism done for mainstream media channels is nothing more than repitition of the day’s news agenda – it’s not a coincidence that most journalists’ bosses are called editors.

Haven’t you ever noticed how many news channels at any given time are just churning through the same few Reuters or AP stories as everybody else?  This can be potentially, if not in fact usually, less “original” than more obviously link-based journalism as there is inevitably less freedom and multi-lateralism in the sources.

Then again, I went to art college I have even read Death of the Author so I guess I’ve been a bit brainwashed.

Along the lines of my recent post about car-related deaths versus terrorism-related deaths, see this graph representing the amounts of deaths related to different issues.

I may have to steal the ‘Saint Pete for Peace’ moniker.