Leslie Franke

Opera has released Opera Mini worldwide. Opera Mini is designed to allow web browsing on mobile phones which are otherwise incapable of using a web browser. Besides working on mobile phones, Opera Mini runs well and is an excellent browser on newer Palms which can run the IBM JVM. Changes to the earlier builds I believe include include two screen modes (compared to three) and smooth scrolling.

You can download Opera Mini from the product’s homepage or directly for the Palm from here. While the download page only lists the Treo 650 and the Tungsten C, I have ran Opera Mini with success on a T3 and others have reported success on other Palms. For more on how to load the IBM JVM on your Palm see the first part of this post.

Update: The file can be found at http://mini.opera.com/global/opera-mini-advanced-us.jad. The easiet way to get this on your Palm is by using the IBM Java VM application. Open the appliction, click the install button and enter in the above URL, and the Palm will then download the file and convert it into PRC file for you.

Note: For those concerned about privacy, a word of warning. Opera Mini uses a remote server to pre process the page before sending it to the phone thus it will store the cache, cookies, and passwords for pages visited on the service provider’s server.

News via Opera Watch.

The following is the second part of my “Palm Best Of” series, laying out what I feel to be the best free Palm software, the best Palm developers, and the best Palm websites. Listed below are the best Palm related websites on the Internet and, also, the mobile versions of some very popular websites. The best free Palm software was presented earlier and an article on the best Palm developers is still to come.

Palm Related Websites

Forums

1src – Palm related forums and news. They have the best help and discussion forums on the web for the Palm T and Sony Clie handhelds.

MobileRead – Palm and PPC related forums and news. They have excellent ebook reading and mobile web reading forums.

TreoCentral – Palm Treo orientated forum and news. Probably the best Treo forums on the web.

News

Palm247 – Palm news updated daily.

PalmAddicts – Palm news blog which is updated on a constant basis. Any Palm news worth mentioning will probably be posted here.

Software and Ebooks

Memoware – Large listing of free ebooks. These ebooks are compiled by members of the site and are available for downloading in many different ebook formats.

PalmOpenSource – Directory of open source Palm software.

PalmGear – The largest directory of commercial Palm software on the web. The complaints of users and application developers about Palmgear is long and varied but their mere size makes them hard to ignore.

Palm Friendly Website Portals

PDA Portal

Treobits

Small Sites

Palm Friendly Websites

Accuweather

Amazon

AOL Portal

BBC

CBS Marketwatch

Bloglines

ESPN

GMail

Google

Mail2Web

Mapquest

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Merriam-Webster Thesaurus

MSN Mobile

New York Times – Page One

Technorati

USA Today

Wunderground

Yahoo

Joe Hewitt has developed a new Firefox extension called FireBug, desccribed as a “sort of a combination of the DOM Inspector and the JavaScript console, in a frame at the bottom of each browser window”. In addition, it allows you to inspect XMLHttpRequest responses and offers per-page logging. Be warned it is only an alpha release, but it worked pretty well for me in the short time I tried it.

Like the Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet, this one page cheat sheet brings together Mozilla Thunderbirds’s keyboard & mouse shortcuts, a few tips & tricks, and where to find things in Thunderbird, onto one simple to view page.

• PDF format
• HTML format

Ben Goodger, the lead engineer for Mozilla Firefox, has just written an article summing up what Mozilla Firefox users can look forward to for Firefox 2.0. We should see Firefox 2.0 by the middle of 2006 with some “significant user experience enhancements”.

A proposed new feature in Mozilla Firefox automates a common web linking technique and consequently brings forth some concerns about user privacy. As of now, this feature is only in Mozilla’s nightly trunk versions (not the version of the average user would download).

Currently, many web sites send people, who click on links, to a server which counts their click and then redirects them to the link’s original destination. Firefox’s “ping” proposal lets web sites do this in a less transparent and more efficient manner. When you click on a link, a “ping” is sent to a server notifying it of your click while the browser loads the destination page. As explained in Darin’s post, “I’m sure this may raise some eye-brows among privacy conscious folks, but please know that this change is being considered with the utmost regard for user privacy. The point of this feature is to enable link tracking mechanisms commonly employed on the web to get out of the critical path and thereby reduce the time required for users to see the page they clicked on.”

This is not something that Mozilla should be including in Firefox, especially if the user cannot control the pinging taking place and be able to block the feature from any site they wish (a white list). In the end, this “ping” feature seems to be another version of tracking users and does not rise to the level of spyware. From a performance standpoint, I see the desire for this feature and it is encouraging that Mozilla has been so forthcoming about it. What does concern me, though, is another section of Darin’s post, “This change is being considered in large part because some very popular websites have asked for a solution to this problem.” I am sure that Google, Yahoo, and others are begging to have this feature enabled to help track clicks, but it is a feature very few users would ask for. I would hope Firefox continues to be a slim light-weight browser that focuses on the needs and security of the user. This “ping” is about neither and I hope is not a sign of things to come.

Update: For a good discussion of this topic see Oil Meet Water: Link Tracking in Firefox at Newsome.org and send_pings and losing my innocense by Chris Messina (of Flock fame).

Rollyo has just released a tool that enables Mozilla Firefox users to create toolbar search engines, of up to 25 sites, very quickly. These search tools will install in the upper right hand corner of your browser along with the Google, Yahoo, etc. search engines. It is a very simple process to create one yourself or use one someone else has created.

Using a Rollyo Firefox search engine is easy. Look for the link on each search page that says “Click here to add the ___________ to your Firefox Search!”. Click on this link and then click on OK when Firefox asks if it can install the search engine. To use the search engine, just click on the little drop down error in the search box and choose the Rollyo search and away you go.

Here are my Rollyo searches. Anyone of these can be turned into a Firefox search engine.
Palm
Palm Software
Firefox

And others of note.
Palm Addict by Sam Mcloughlin
Firefox Development by Chris Pederick
Palm by 1src.com

Note: If you install a search engine which you do not want to continue using, it is easy to uninstall the search engine by using the Firefox SearchPluginHacks extension from IosArt. The SearchPluginHacks extension adds a entry to right-click menu in the search plugins drop-down list, which allows quickly deleting unwanted search engines.

Update: Rollyo has also developed a tool to allow a user to create and add a search engine to Firefox without having to register with Rollyo.