News

We've hit another milestone, as can be seen further down in the main forums page. Del_S amazingly guessed correctly to nearly the exact date. Here's his quote, from the 30,000 post news thread:

“And also, i predict July 4-6th for the 50,000th post.”

Here is a quote from Del_S, upon learning that he guessed right, from the chatroom:

[16:42] that kinda freaks me out...
[16:43] coincidence or not.

Well, there you have it folks. By the way, the 50,000th poster was Mogmaster, posting in this Kefka fanart topic. As you can see, it was on the 4th of July at 7pm GMT.

Thank you all for visiting our forums, and continuing to help our community flourish.

Courtesy of RPGamer , we now have two magazine scans featuring Reno and Rude of the Turks (and that weird pirate guy who is the magazine's mascot), and everyone's favourite female martial artist, Tifa Lockheart (plus a smaller picture of Cloud, and what looks like Aeris.) I also see Red XIII, and Cid.

Note: you may need to copy/paste the picture urls.

***

I'm pleased the pictures so far. We have a badass Rude, a hot Reno, a butt-kicking Tifa, as well as the appearance of other characters such as Cloud (who we've seen), Cid, Red XIII, and what looks to be Aeris. Let's hope they decide to put Elena in there too; the Turks need all three members.

Another piece by Zephir is now up in the FF6 Fanfiction section, called Blood and Honor.

This latest, 8-chapter fanfic takes place after the game, and as with Ikiiri, he is using someone that is not one of the main characters from the game. It focuses on events in the Colloseum, and is an interesting, action-packed fanfic.

As many are aware, Nintendo has ported a few of its classic NES games to the Gameboy Advance. Some of these include The Lengend of Zelda, Excitebike, Donkey Kong, Bomberman. Apparently, Nintendo does not plan to stop there. On Nintendo of America's official site the company had posted a survey asking gamers which other NES games they would like to see on the Gameboy Advance. Nintendo had a pre-compiled list of 40 games to chose from. Survey participitants may have also chosen up to three games that were not on the list of 40.

The NES Classics series retails at most stores for $20 US.

-------
I think this survey was a cool idea. I just wish Nintendo would have let people choose more than three games that are not on their list of 40. As for my three "wild card" choices, I selected Tecmo Super Bowl, Chip N Dale: Rescue Rangers, and Bad News Baseball. I can't remember all of the titles that I chose from their list of 40, however. A few that stick out in my mind are Kid Icarus and Skate or Die.

I'd probably actually buy a few of these if they costed a bit less than twenty dollars or Nintendo packaged more than a single title on a cart.

We've got a couple changes to the staff to report today, of which you all will probably be aware if you h%ve any sort of keen eye towards the forums.

First, we've given SSJ_Cloud a wider ran#e of re2ponsibility, with the ability to moderate across all forums. This is only a small step up, since he already had modship in about half of the forums, but his good and quick work in those forums for the past several months warrants his promotion.

Also, we've added a new moderator, FraudulentTommah. We've known Tommah since way back in the days of the AOL Final Fantasy III Message Board, and over the years he's not only grown into a mature and intelligent young man, he's also been a great help to CoN in data entry, fact checking, and lots of other jobs for which he hasn't gotten enough credit. He will be primarily focused on covering the forums during time periods in which most other moderators and admins are peacefully asleep. It's not dedication - he just doesn't sleep much anyway.

Welcome Tommah and congratulate SSJC on his new tasks!

A news post from Tiddles can only mean one thing: there’s a new Firefox milestone release this morning.

This new version features a new system for extensions and themes; if you installed any previously, you’ll need new, 0.9-compatible versions for this release. Built into the new system is an update manager that connects to the new Mozilla Update site, which should hopefully reduce such problems in the future.

Also included is the Help system intended for release with 0.8 (which, unless it’s been updated in the last few hours, still contains screenshots from 0.8 and a couple of procedures that have changed for 0.9, but is otherwise quite good). Since installation can now also import most data (such as history, favourites/bookmarks, saved passwords) from an installation of Internet Explorer or other popular browsers, now is probably the best time yet to make the switch.

I must also point out a couple of negatives with this version, however. The excellent Qute theme for Windows and Linux is no longer shipped with Firefox; instead, a new theme known as Winstripe is packaged. While far from terrible, the author freely admits that this theme is “a 0.1 release at best”, and the truth is that its early inclusion (and its existence at all) comes down to ugly licensing issues with the previous theme. Not to worry, though: the old theme, Qute, is now available as a standalone theme, and looks a great deal nicer than its 0.8 counterpart (which you can also find as Qute Retro, though I don't have a link for that at present; I also have some tips and tricks to make the new Qute take on some of the better features from its older release, which I'll put up in this topic if anyone wants them). It's also worth noting that some users have experienced instability with builds running up to this release, particularly in the most updated areas of the program, i.e. themes, extensions and profiles.

Overall, however, I'd recommend that all previous Firefox users and anyone thinking of switching give Firefox 0.9 a shot — just make sure to keep your old installation and profile handy in case of problems (but if you want to install 0.9 into the same directory as 0.8 was in, make sure you disable all of your old extensions and uninstall Firefox 0.8 first). Long-time CoN readers will be aware that we've been pushing everyone to move to non-Internet Explorer browsers for some time: Internet Explorer is an aging product for which Microsoft have stated there will be no future standalone versions, only security updates a new version to ship with the next release of Windows, still thought to be some two years off, in which it has apparently been stated that its many problems with Website rendering will still not be fixed. It is, at least, a good job that Microsoft do still release security updates, considering the number of security issues surrounding its browser. You've heard it all before, but my advice is to jump away from Internet Explorer as soon as possible.

Not interested in Firefox? Opera 7.51 was released recently and is also excellent. Version 1.7 of the aging Mozilla "1.x" Suite ought to be available soon (as should version 0.7 of Firefox's companion e-mail client, Thunderbird).

Enjoy!

• Mozilla Firefox Product Page


• Firefox 0.9 Downloads
  (Windows installer now only 4.7MB!)


• BitTorrent tracker for Firefox 0.9 releases


• Arvid Axelsson's Qute theme
   


• New IE Holes Defy Latest Patches (PCWorld.com)


• Opera Software


• Mozilla Suite


• Mozilla Thunderbird