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The Simpson are moving to Universal Studios. Following up the Harry Potter announcement, Universal has also announced that Springfield’s favorite family will debut in the Hollywood and Orlando theme parks next year. It sounds like they will be getting a ride style attraction and not the “Island of Adventure” treatment Harry Potter is getting. Can you imagine a “real” Springfield city block? That would be too cool.

I guess the next visit to Florida, we’ll be going to Universal and looking for Bart, Homer and the rest of the family.

“The ride is designed to duplicate the ‘Simpsons’ home-viewing experience, only at high speed and with lots of screaming,” creator Matt Groening said in a statement.

The agreement between NBC Universal & Fox also includes provisions that will allow characters from “The Simpsons” to be integrated into the larger Universal theme park brand. Actors dressed like “Simpsons” characters will start roaming the grounds of both parks, while stores devoted to selling “Simpsons”-themed souvenirs will pop up.

I like that last line. At least they admit is all about the merchandise.

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Computerworld published an article entitled “Top 10 Firefox Extensions to Avoid” and of course I had to read it. Some of their choices were odd, most I agreed with and one made me write this post.

ScribeFire (formerly Performancing)

This falls into the category of extensions that seem pointless. What we have here is a browser-based tool for writing blog posts. But don’t most blogs already have a browser-based editor that works just fine?

Perhaps there’s a blogging system out there that needs this kind of helper app, but we’re not familiar with it. Until we come upon such a beast, we’d rather skip the overhead of an extension and stick to our blogging software’s built-in editor.

Don’t get us wrong, ScribeFire is a nice piece of software. We just don’t see a need for it at this time. If you do happen to be using blogging software without a decent editor, ScribeFire would be a fine addition to your extension toolbox.

Yes, WordPress and other blog engines have build in editors, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be very useful, now would they? I think they’re missing the point with ScribeFire. The nice think about this extension is I can post to my blog without having to go there. I can keep all my tabs open in Firefox, click back and forth between them, copy and paste, and all the while, the ScribeFire window stays in place below. It makes it terribly easy to reference what you’re writing about. If I used the WordPress editor, I would have to click back and forth between tabs or have multiple windows open to do the same thing.

Sorry ComputerWorld, but you missed the mark on that one.

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Recently, I started having problems viewing certain HD QuickTime links. Before, I could click on the link to the HD trailer (480, 720, or 1080) and the QuickTime window would open and the trailer would start to load. Somewhere along the line, that changed. I’m not sure if developers are linking the content differently or if Firefox or QuickTime changed their loading structure, but .qtl links were not working in Firefox (or IE for that matter).

When clicked, the link would present the SAVE or OPEN dialog. Selecting open would open a small QuickTime window, with no content. Saving the file and then opening it produced the same results. After watching one or two non-HD trailers, I had to find a solution and here it is.

If you are presented with a SAVE/OPEN dialog box when clicking a .qtl QuickTime HD link, simply save the .qtl and change the extension to .TXT. Open the resulting text file and you should see the direct link to the HD trailer. Open up QuickTime. Select File -> Open URL (CTRL + U) and paste in the URL and you’re ready to go. Welcome back HD QuickTime goodness.

For instance, the following link:
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/movies/hdtrailers/columbia/spiderman3final/720/?
http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mo/spiderman3final_720.qtl

Links to this, when saved:
http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?sid=35419655&sdm=web&pt=rd

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Well, at least one student does.

I understand where he’s coming from, really, I do. I’ve complained here (and at my old job) that things would be so much easier if Firefox were the default browser, instead of IE.

But, the reality of the situation is in most cases the switch cannot be made. I try to make everything I develop work just as well on Firefox as it does in IE, but not every developer follows those rules. Universities and businesses all use outside applications. Portal systems, ticket systems, Exchange servers. Many of those systems simply do not work well with Firefox.

Firefox doesn’t display all the functionality of MS Exchange when using it online. Firefox doesn’t support Window’s domain authentication (it send passwords in unencrypted text). Many web portals (especially academic ones) do not pass information correctly in Firefox.

That leaves the question, where does the responsibility lie. Should Firefox develop future versions with support for those features in mind or should application and software developers ensure Firefox support with future releases? There’s no easy answer, which means there is no easy solution. However, with Firefox (and other browsers) gaining users every day, it’s a question which will continue to come up.