Firefox 3 Arrives

With both a bang (from a gazillion people hitting reload and/or check for updates) and a whimper (from the Mozilla servers trying to survive the onslaught).

Fun times.

What most people did not understand is that if they were already running RC3, there was not going to be a real difference between that and 3.0. It would be OK to wait an hour or three before downloading the damn thing. I got tired of using check for updates, so after the first two hours I went to the download page.

And there it was. Basically identical to RC3 as I expected it.

(as I type this I realized that I forgot to upgrade it on Windows, duh!)

I just checked CPU usage, less than 30%, not exactly terrible. The killer feature for me is the awesome bar:



As you type into the address bar, it searches your history. I really love it because sometimes I have to hit three versions of the same URL while working on something (I may be looking at a project's production server, while looking at the maintenance and staging copies at the same time) and it is really sweet to type three arbitrary parts of the url and have the one you want scroll up to the top of the list. I have no idea about who came up with this concept but it is pure genius.

Funny, I checked my Windows version again, it is showing as 3.0, not as a beta. I have no clue how and when it was updated since I haven't run the damned thing in days.

I tried to use Foxmarks for centralized bookmarks, but it is a worse solution than Google Bookmarks (which requires the Google Toolbar to be of any real use). I actually managed to export my Google Bookmarks into Safari, then into Firefox and finally into Foxmarks. Firefox 3 choked bad simply by dragging more than a dozen bookmark folders. After an hour of fighting it, I deleted the extension, cleaned the bookmarks and resumed using Google Bookmarks and the Toolbar.

As for performance, it is hard to gauge since this is a dual core CPU, but at least I can tell it isn't choking the machine or eating up all of the memory. With 5 tabs open it is hovering at 30% or less.

Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8

Although Beta 2 of Internet Explorer (IE) 8 isn’t due out until some time in August, Microsoft is cautioning Web site owners now that they need to be prepping now for possible problems the new, more standards-compliant browser may cause.

As part of this week’s IE June Security Update for IE8 Beta 1, Microsoft introduced a new tag, “IE+EmulateIE7″ — which it is counting on to head off some of the incompatibilities the company is anticipating could occur, based on feedback it received from IE 8 Beta 1 testers.

[From Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8 | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com]

Big trouble ahead for all of us whose livelihoods depend on writing web applications that will render properly in the worst browser used by the biggest amount of our users: Internet Explorer 7. Somewhere out there a miserable bastard still has a user breakdown with a majority of IE6, I don't feel sorry for him: better him than me.

It's funny because this whole standards compliance switching is not much appreciated outside of the circle of people that have to make the damn websites look OK. There are even morons suggesting that there is no point on upgrading. They don't understand that there are millions of people that don't even know what a web browser is, to them the internet/web is the blue IE icon on their quick launch bar and desktop.

They have no clue about Firefox, and of course they can't tell the difference between IE6 and IE7 because either they don't know or they don't care.

Us, on the other hand, are in trouble. Every time we see something render right in IE and wrong in Firefox, we say fuck it, this is a corporate app, they are locked into IE. But what happens when everyone gets migrated over the weekend to IE8 and suddenly (thanks to the strict standards compliance mode) everyone sees the app look as crappy in IE as it did in Firefox.

Suddenly it looks like Firefox was right all along.

Right now I can tell I am going to have serious issues with two things:

1. The menu controls that ship with ASP.net 2.0.

2. The way fieldsets render in non-IE browsers.

I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Thunderbird still sucks

The last time I used Mozilla Thunderbird it was in Windows, I was trying to stay away from Outlook. Eventually it was so infuriating that it drove me back to Outlook.

That was over two years ago.

I also tried to use Mail.app but the problem is that it doesn't play nice with Outlook. My boss uses Outlook, that means *I* have to make sure I send the emails so he can see them OK, not the other way around. There is a weird incompatibility between Mail.app and Outlook due to Unicode: sometimes Outlook can't tell that the message should be set to Unicode.

The only fix I know is to add a Unicode character to my signature, which would force the whole message to be Unicode and Outlook will see it properly.

I switched back to Mail.app a couple of months ago because I did not wanted to keep Parallels open just to reply to work email, and the Unicode signature hack more or less worked, but I found another problem: many times I was replying to emails thinking it was in rich text mode, when in reality it was sending the email in plain text, something that dear leader hates.

This week I finally broke down and tried the newest Thunderbird. To my dismay, it could not even import emails from Mail.app, and their instructions on how to do it by hand were completely and absolutely wrong. After three or four days I found a program that lets me export Mail.app mailboxes one at a time, then a Thunderbird extension that can read these exported files.

The end result? I got all 25,000 or so emails, but once again, I hate Thunderbird.

1. Search sucks.



2. The preferences suck.



3. It took me over five minutes to find out where the hell to change my signature.



4. My signature comes out as plain text no matter what. If I add html markup to it, it encodes it. If I try rich text, it encodes it.



5. No smart mailboxes!

I could go on.

I even tried Mailsmith, but it is god damn ugly, and it won't do html emails. I hate Eudora with passion, there is no way in hell I am going to use that voluntarily. And I can't use my favorite email, Gmail, because when I use impersonation Outlook says "email sent by user@gmail.com on behalf of user@domain.com."

What else is out there for 10.5? Even if it costs money, I just want something that works at least as good as Mail.app but with less html email drama.

Mozilla CEO Says Apple’s Safari ‘Update’ Undermines Users’ Trust

Whether you want it or not, you may accidentally install Apple’s Safari web browser on your computer by doing a routine update to your iTunes. That sounds strange? It is, as it seems to be a rather pushy strategy from Apple to promote their new software.

After Joe Wilcox noted in his Microsoft Watch blog yesterday that an Apple Software Update window popped on his daughter’s computer offering a Safari download as “bonus” to the regular update, talks about Apples strategy began to emerge.

Mozilla CEO John Lily noted on his blog: “What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad – not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web.”

[From Mozilla CEO Says Apple’s Safari ‘Update’ Undermines Users’ Trust]

Jesus Christ, would you grow a pair of balls?

Is the Apple envy in the FOSS community so bad that everyone is going to get their panties in a bunch over a god damn installer? I saw the stupid installer, it had THREE things in it:

1. iTunes



2. Quicktime



3. Safari

There is NOTHING covert or unfair about it. It has a list of three things, clearly named, and each item has a check box. No surprises there.

And how the fuck is this a security issue? Vista was a complete flop, Firefox 3 is still not out of beta, yet big hats from both camps have the time to stop their hard work (whatever the hell is it they do) to bitch and moan about a pop up with an optional download/update?

Firefox 3, Beta 4

I have been running Firefox 3 since beta 2 (OS X 10.4), this is the first time that (from what I can see), the add-ons are starting to fall behind. I don't give a shit about the Google toolbar and the minor stuff, but I really need Flash Block back. The only reason I ever have Firefox 3b4 crashing is because of Flash, otherwise it runs pretty damn nice.

Also, would somebody please get on with the god damn program and figure out how to write a bookmarks add-on for Google Bookmarks? If you don't take into account the Google toolbar, support for Google bookmarks is literally nonexistent. Everyone has a plugin for frickin del.icio.us, so how come there is nothing usable for Google bookmarks?

Except for those two basic nags, I like it a lot. It is faster and runs even better. So please, with sugar on top, Flash Block and Google Bookmarks.

Photo Credit: Photo by pigstyave, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.