Firefox 5th Anniversary Celebrations at Pantnagar

“Happy Birthday dear Firefox!!!”

Firefox lovers from College of Technology, Pantnagar gathered for the 5^th Anniversary Celebrations of world’s favourite browser – Firefox outside the old college building and sang these lines in the glory of Firefox! It was a fun filled celebration with lots of prizes and goodies for the well wishers of Firefox.

I was excited already seeing the quality of cake baked by the local shopkeeper and, for a change, was at the event venue a minute in advence, that is, at 3:59pm! I was shortly joined by Sumit Sati and very soon about 15 other enthusiasts joined the party. The young girls from first year (although they didn’t have a hunch what this Firefox was) had designed an excellent Firefox banner which was a piece of attraction throughout the celebrations. After the cake cutting and subsequent customary eating, everyone present shared their Firefox Experiences. The guys discussed how they got to know Firefox, what they liked in Firefox which made it better than ‘some other browsers’, and of course, their favourite add-ons! Video Download Helper, Echofon, Download Them All, Firebug and AdBlock Plus were the clear favourites of those present there.

Then was the time for some quizzing and goodies! Me and Sumit Sati put up a number of questions which the young guns of the college smartly answered to take away all what we had – Firefox wrist bands, stickers and lanyards (which we had carefully preserved from Mozilla Camp Delhi). Due to various competitive examinations and other factors, the attendance was quite low but it was lots of fun, all the same!

Pics and videos from the party.

Payback Time: Celebrating 5th Birth Anniversary of Firefox

Ever since the Tim Berners Lee gave us the world wide web, we have seen numerous technologies and innovations on this platform. For me, and i am sure for millions others, Mozilla Firefox is one of the best out of them. The web was sick of the monopolistic attitude of some bullying ‘explorers’ and deserved a change. This welcome change was brought about with the initiation of the Mozilla project which gave us this cute li’l baby called Firefox. Now this baby is 5 years young and is revolutionizing the experience of the web for the users every minute. I personally rediscovered the web using Firefox over IE.

My introduction to Firefox is an interesting story. It was the year 2006 and i was on my home PC, searching for some stuff or the other put in it by the computer salesperson from whom my father had bought it. Doing so, i stumbled upon a .exe setup of something called a Firefox! I instantly loved the name and installed it just for the sake of satisfying my curiosity. When it got installed (it was a 1.x version and it took only a few seconds in installation!), i found out that it was a web browser. At that time, i had a dial-up 33.6 kbps connection on which IE used to give me 1.0kbps to 1.5kbps of download ‘speed’. I tried downloading with Firefox and voila, on the same connection, it gave me speed of 3kbps! I was jubiliated and since that day, i have never used IE (except for cases when i don’t have any option :().

Mozilla celebrated the 5th birth anniversary of Firefox on 9th November, 2009. There have been several Firefox 5th Birth Anniversary celebrations around the world in the past week and two. So me, along with my batchmates and fellow members of Open Source User Group, Pantnagar are organising a party in our college to celebrate the 5th birth anniversary of Firefox! We would be having a small cake cutting ceremony followed by a quiz on Firefox. There are exciting prizes to be won! The details of the party are as under:
Date : Sunday, 22 November 2009

Time : 4:00 pm onwards

Venue: PCT Lawns
Everyone associated with the college (students, professors, workers, everyone) is cordially invited to be a part of this fun! It’s payback time for every one to whom Firefox has given so very much in the past 5 years.

Spread the word: http://3.ly/5p7

Spread Firefox: http://www.spreadfirefox.com

Firefox 5th Anniversary Celebrations

 

Fight FOSS Ignorance

One of the major factors which help proprietary software vendors keep a grip on the market is ignorance on the part of the consumers. Newspapers, one of the key sources of information to the common man, to aren’t playing their part and in their state of ignorance, helping such organizations.

Recently, on twitter, i pointed out the proprietary bias shown by Times of India vs Open Mindedness shown by The Hindu “#timesofindia vs #thehindu Clear proprietary bias shown by #timesofindia http://3.ly/bvh
and http://3.ly/MQk #opensource #linux “.

I also came across many internet related news articles in the local paper Amar Ujala which uses the logo of Internet Explorer in all their web-related articles. It gives a wrong notion to the ignorant masses that the Internet and Internet Explorer are synonymous. So i pointed out this to the Editor, Amar Ujala through a letter, a copy of which I am pasting below. My motive is to inspire every reader to fight FOSS ignorance in whatever best way s/he can and spread the spirit of Open Source.

All the best to all.

The Letter
—————-
Hello sir,

I am a regular reader of your newspaper an am highly appreciative of
the content matter and the quality of unbiased journalism of the
daily.

I would like to point your kind attention to a regular feature of the
web related articles published in Amar Ujala. Most of such articles
contain the logo of Microsoft’s proprietary web browser – Internet
Explorer.

Apart from being a free publicity for the browser and the company, it
gives a wrong notion to the lakhs of readers of the newspaper that the
Internet and Internet Explorer are synonymous. The role of a newspaper
is to create a better, an aware society. Using Microsoft Internet
Explorer’s logo in your articles gives the ignorant readers a notion
that Internet Explorer is what the Internet is all about, which is
totally wrong. A newspaper of your reputation should instead promote
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which gives the users the freedom
to use them, without being under the restrictions of copyright laws.
Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular Open Source browsers
available. Another Open Source browser, Google Chrome is doing well in
the browser market. Opera and Apple’s Safari, though not Open Source,
are still options available to the users.

My only concern is that the newspaper should not mislead the readers.

Hence I request you to kindly look into the matter and do something in
this regard as early as possible. I would like to get an
acknowledgment of this letter to you.

I would be highly obliged.

Thanking you

Yours sincerely,

—
Tanay Mathpal
Final Yr, Computer Engineering
College of Technology
Pantnagar