Updates to the Firefox Home app for iPhone and to the Firefox Sync add-on for Firefox (Windows|Mac) fix the top three problems users reported for each program, says Mozilla.
The new version of Firefox Home (1.0.1), a companion app for the Firefox browser on iPhone, now supports usernames with upper-case letters for logging in to the URL viewer.
It also inserts a help button on the log-in page that will link you to common troubleshooting tips. The final addition is a set of error notifications that Mozilla hopes will explain application errors with more clarity when they do occur.
The update hadn’t appeared in the App Store on our iPhone at the time of writing.
Since Firefox Home is essentially an iPhone-flavored offshoot of the Firefox Sync service, Mozilla made some changes to that program a well. Firefox Sync 1.4.3 is now able to complete a first-time sync even if you’re browsing in Private mode, a significant addition.
The update also corrects a problem with multibyte characters in passwords. Lastly, it adds a sync indicator on the interface to let you know your status, and how much time you have left to sync your history, bookmarks, and open tabs.
You can update Firefox Sync through the add-ons submenu in Firefox.
Firefox Sync stores data about your browsing history, bookmarks, and open browser tabs online. Firefox Home is the iPhone arm of the service that lets you access those URLs from your iPhone, as a way to save time searching over again for links to your favorite sites. Using Firefox Home on the iPhone requires you to first run Firefox Sync for the Firefox browser.
Keep in mind that Firefox Home isn’t itself a browser, though it does use the Apple-approved WebKit viewer to display your stored URLs. You can also open those sites in the iPhone’s default Safari browser.
How do you know how fast your Internet connection is? You probably just trust that your ISP is giving you the bandwidth you’re paying for and go on your merry way.
But a curious study out of the U.K. suggests that, while actual, real-world broadband speeds are indeed increasing (in Britain that average has gone from 4.1Mbps to 5.2Mbps in the last year), they still aren’t measuring up to advertised speeds.
For example, the actual speed of DSL lines advertised as offering “up to” 8 or 10Mbps was actually just 3.3Mbps. For DSL lines advertising 20 to 24Mbps, the actual speed was a mere 6.5Mbps.
Things look better for cable-modem users — 10Mbps advertised rates hit an actual 8.7Mbps, and 20Mbps advertised rates hit 15.7Mbps — but never did the actual throughput overtake what was promised.
While speeds may be increasing, that gap is widening: In April 2009, the average speed was 58 percent of the advertised rate. Now that speed is just 45 percent of the advertised rate, on average. In other words, rates are rising, but empty promises are rising even faster.
Why is this happening? As Ars Technica notes, one issue is that regulators in both the U.S. and overseas tend to rely on advertised rates to determine how fast citizens’ Internet service is, and to comply with local regulations, so having higher and higher advertised rates looks good. Rarely do regulators actually measure to see if those advertised rates have any basis in reality, which has left ISPs free to boost them largely with impunity.
But now the government is finally catching on, which could open the door not just for more inquiries into how the ISPs market their products, but to false advertising claims from users themselves.
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