Remember those SSL certificates called Extended Validation certificates? Well, one of their major drawbacks was that they only worked when your customer was using IE7 to browse your website. Now, with Firefox version 3, you have more than 8 million more browsers on the internet able to see an EV certificate. Upon entering a site using a EV SSL certificate, Firefox will display a green button, much like IE7’s green bar. A blue button means an SSL certificate is installed, but it’s not an EV cert, and a grey button means the  page you’re on is not using SSL. The worst buttons to see are red (a known malicious website) or yellow (an invalid SSL certificate). You can read more about this new feature here.

Firefox 3 has many other new features. Among them is a better handling on your computers resources (memory) which equals a quicker more efficient browsing experience.  Other features include a new URL discovery designed to allow you to quickly navigate to the website you want to get to. The address bar will try to find an address you’re typing based on your browsing history.

As always, our customers can purchase a Comodo EV SSL certificate from Applied Innovations at a greatly discounted rate ($349.95 as of the date of this writing).

Today Joomla released an update to their CMS called “Naiki” and our PHP webhosting customers using this CMS may want to install the update. If you are running a previous version 1.5.x, you should download the update patch and run it. You can read the release notes and installation instructions here.

Although Applied Innovations is an ASP.net specialized web-host, many do not realize that PHP is available to our customers. With the flip of a switch in the HELM control panel, you can enable PHP. Then, with a mySQL database which is included with VS-1 and higher plans, you can install Joomla! for free and have a huge community of PHP/Open Source developers working together to bring you free add-ons such as the famous free shopping cart “Virtuemart“. PHP runs on Windows, and it runs great especially with “Fast CGI” which is installed on AppliedI’s shared webservers. It should be noted that an advantage of Windows and IIS is that you can run ASP.net 3.5 and PHP side-by-side. Something you can not do on Linux (Well, not 100% functionally anyway; see “ASP.net - mod_mono“).