Firefox 1.5

I have set up a new box with Ubuntu 6.04 "Dapper Drake" which includes Firefox 1.5. Two small improvements were made, and the other Linux factories were updated too:

• Screen resolution set explicitly to 90 DPI (to fix small fonts)
• Mouse pointer moved explicitly to top left corner (to fix problems with mouse-over effects and multi-page screenshots)

Flash 8

The Macromedia Flash player on our MSIE factory has been upgraded from version 7 to 8. I just couldn't resist when the task bar popup appeared, and installation was smooth and quick.

Opera now ad-free

I have upgraded the Opera screenshot factories to version 8.50 today. It gives you more screen space because the integrated banner ads have been removed. All queuing jobs for Opera 7.54 have been changed to 8.50, too.

Read more on opera.com…

ShotFactory ported to Windows XP

The ShotFactory program has been ported to Windows XP and is now being tested with MSIE 6.0 on a dedicated XP machine. Previously, MSIE screenshots were produced from Windows 98 in QEMU on Debian, but this has been way too slow. Hopefully the new factory will reduce the huge backlog of 20 days for MSIE screenshots.

Safari 2.0 on Mac OS X 10.4.1 Tiger

I have started testing a port of the ShotFactory program to Mac OS X. It's still in Python, but it uses a lot of AppleScript to control Safari.

Chinese TrueType fonts

We had some visitors from Taiwan today who were inconvenienced by the apparent lack of Chinese fonts on our screenshot factories. So I have installed the ttf-arphic-* Debian packages and requeued some of the jobs to test them. If you have more suggestions for improvement, please send email.

Update: Konqueror was still missing some characters. I fixed the problem around 19:00 UTC by installing even more font packages. The command "dpkg -l | grep font | wc -l" now returns 80. Feel free to resubmit your site to see if the fonts are ok now.

Queue shorter, new browsers

New Feature: the job queue now shows an estimate how long it will take to finish newly submitted jobs. The queue length has gone down to 15 hours. To stop the job queue from getting shorter, I added another browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE 6.0). And I upgraded Mozilla to 1.7.8 and Firefox to 1.0.4. Of course this is still beta testing. If you find problems, send mail.

More fonts (70 megs added)

Some screenshots have had problems with missing fonts on our screenshot factories. This reflected the typical out-of-the-box setup for a German/English Debian installation. I have now added 70 megabytes worth of international fonts and also the Microsoft Core Fonts (TTF). Let's see if that helps.

Safari on Mac OS X

The first screenshots of Safari have been contributed by Christian Renz today. His Perl module is still in the development stage, but maybe we'll get some Mac screenshots on a regular basis soon.

Screenshot factory in Perl

Christian Renz has started writing a screenshot factory in Perl, and has contributed the first screenshots of Lynx 2.8.4.

More browsers!

We now have the following browsers available for testing: Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany, Konqueror, Opera, each in 6 different screen resolutions, as well as MSIE 5.5 and 3.0, each in 4 resolutions, including 640x480 pixels with only 4 bits per pixel (16 colors), which looks real retro.

Have a look at some recent screenshots and then submit your own site for testing. All browsers are currently run on one machine. Processing may take circa 20 minutes for 40 screenshots.

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