Firefox Crashing When Searching And Playing Flash

I've been having this problem for quite sometime now with various versions of Firefox (3.5.7 here as of this writing).

Problem description: When there's something playing, or has already played with flash content (like youtube videos), and then I attempt to search for text in a page and that text is NOT found, the browser crashes (segfault).

I found 2 solutions to this, one of them seems more of a workaround rather than a solution, and the real problem seems to be coming from Adobe's Flash plugin for Linux (they just can never get it right...).

Solutions:

1. Turn off search sound: open a tab and in the address type: about:config
   look for sound and then disable: accessibility.typeaheadfind.enablesound by double clicking it, then restart your browser.
2. Use nspluginwrapper along with Adobe's libflash package. Whether the search sound is enabled or disabled, this should work just fine.

VPN Service: Free For A While

A generous friend has setup a cluster of secure VPN servers in USA and is now offering the service for free for a couple of months to test the systems out.

If you don't know what a VPN is, it stands for Virtual Private Network; basically, you connect to the Internet, then to a VPN server and all your Internet traffic goes through that server.
Since the servers are in USA, you can access all websites that require you to be in the US, like Hulu online streaming site, watch copyrighted videos on youtube, and a lot more!

I've been using it for a while now and it's great!

You can now subscribe for free and enjoy the service. It works on Mac, Windows & Linux. To join, simply send an email to: promotion [theAtSign] vpnod.com, with subject vpnod.

An account will be automatically and instantly created for you where your email is your username and the password is autogenerated by the system. You'll also receive instructions on how to set it up on Windows.

If you need help on how to set it up on Mac or Linux, let me know. (Anonymous comments are enabled).

Google To Phase Out IE6 Support

As received by email: (emphasis is mine)

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

A subtle sucker-punch to Microsoft for not supporting their own products, while still supporting Firefox 3.0. I thought FF 3.0 would be phased out too!

As for Chrome, as far as I know the stable version is 3.x while 4.x is beta, but I could be wrong.