OStatic

I love the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox so much that it's not uncommon for me to have upwards of 20 open at a time. Unfortunately, several of them are often blank pages because I've forgotten where I was planning to go once I open them.

I've always wished that Firefox would intuitively know that if I highlight an address on a Web page and open a new tab, it's probably because I want to map it. Apparently, I'm not the only one longing for that feature. Mozilla is developing an extension that takes its best guesses about why you've opened a new tab in your Firefox browser.

Just last Thursday, I wrote a post proclaiming my undying love for how quickly open source projects tend to right themselves when sailing the choppy waters of software vulnerabilities. This time around, a vulnerability had been spotted in Firefox, affecting 3.x releases on all platforms. The fix was scheduled for release sometime this week, in the browser's 3.0.8 version.

Firefox 3.0.8 made an early arrival, however, and was officially released Friday afternoon (at 3:45 PST). For those keeping score, this was roughly two days after one of the vulnerabilities it patches was discovered.

By way of Heise Online comes more detailed information about what's causing some to lose data in systems using the new ext4 file system. The ext4 file system, which is slated to eventually replace ext3 as the default file system of choice in many Linux distributions, can experience significant data loss after system crashes or unclean shutdowns.

Ted Ts'o, Linux Foundation's CTO and maintainer of the ext4 file system, says that the loss is due to how ext4 writes to disk. He says ext4, and newer file systems such as XFS and Btrfs, use delayed allocation. This means that writing data to disk can take up to a minute (compared to ext3's write time of about five seconds). The longer write time improves system performance and organization of data on the hard drive. Ts'o says that the ext4 team is working out a solution, but it's an issue that would benefit from being addressed from all angles.