Archive for the ‘Browsers’ Category

Firefox 3.0b5!

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 beta 5 is out (portable version), and it’s better than ever. I haven’t used my still-installed 2.x version for weeks now.

While many of Firefox 3′s new features are mostly of interest to web developers, “the rest of us” can also find much to like in it. It’s faster, takes up less memory, looks better, seems incredibly to be more stable than the stable version (!), and I love the new URL bar, where you can start typing something and it usually suggests what you want after just a few characters. In Firefox 2 you had to start typing from the beggining of an URL (which is always the hostname), but now you can type any part of URLs (including paths after the hostname), site names, and it also looks through your bookmarks, so it can work even if you’ve just cleared your browsing history.

Firefox 3.0 beta 4

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

As of yesterday, I’m using Firefox 3.0 (currently beta 4) as my primary browser. I’m using the portable version, which can be installed separate from Firefox 2, without sharing configurations, but I haven’t needed to use the old version for anything so far — this beta is much more polished than the term “beta” suggests. Fast, stable (zero crashes so far), and with some very interesting features. Plus, the couple extensions I need (as opposed to “it’d be nice to have them) already support Firefox 3 officially (that is, no need to uncompress and edit the version requirements).

Try it — by using the portable version, it won’t affect your Firefox 2 installation in any way. You may find that soon you’ll be using it all the time, just like me. :)

Opera Mini 4.0 beta 2

Friday, August 31st, 2007

OK, I admit it, I was wrong. Opera Mini is fantastic; even the first beta of 4.0 is faster and more stable than the latest (native Symbian) Opera Mobile, and has some great features not available in the latter. And I absolutely love the use of their proxy and the resulting reduced bandwidth. For the record, this is on a Nokia 6630.

Then again, Opera Mobile hasn’t been updated in a year, and it’s 8.x, while Mini (the version 4 betas) are based on 9.x. I have great hopes for Opera Mobile 9, with its Ajax support, among other new stuff.

Anyway, I installed Mini 4.0 beta 2 yesterday evening, and it “feels” even better than the first beta: quicker, a new small font (should be great for screens larger than mine), custom search engines, and it saves whether you want full screen or not; no need to enable it every time I open the browser. :)

Plus, it’s free. Go ahead, try it out.

Opera Mini? Eh…

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Why is everyone so excited about Opera Mini, when this is, IMO, much more interesting? :)

Using 64-bit Firefox on Linux

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

Since the dawn of 64-bit Linux distros, they have included 32-bit versions of browsers such as Firefox, because there aren’t 64-bit versions of plugins such as Java (the 64-bit version doesn’t have a plugin) or Flash.

A couple of days ago, however, I was reading the “what’s new” list for Suse 10.3 Alpha 3, and found this entry:

On x86-64: Firefox is now a 64-bit package and uses nspluginwrapper to handle 32-bit i386 plugins if needed.

Naturally, I had to investigate. I downloaded a 64-bit build of Firefox from Autofox, and nspluginwrapper. With that wrapper, I can use Flash without any problems. (Not Java, though; I think Blackdown offers a 64-bit plugin, but it’s Java 1.4.2 only. But I have found out that I don’t miss Java in the browser at all, for the past few days.)

The browser feels faster. I tend to use bookmark folders to open dozens of bookmarks at the same time on different tabs, which actually makes the browser “hang” for a couple of seconds, and those delays seem shorter now. No, I didn’t do any benchmarks. But the overall experience just “feels” better. It even appears to be more stable, though that may actually come from the fact that I’m using a 2.0.0.4pre build, which is the latest version (2.0.0.3) plus bugfixes… or maybe it’s because this version was built with a non-ancient, and possibly less buggy compiler.

Weirdness with different browsers: Safari, and the rest of the world

Friday, February 9th, 2007

A couple of hours ago, I received an email from a reader of Planet Atheism tell me that it didn’t show up correctly in Safari: fonts were huge.

(Incidentally, PA is a month old today, and, apparently, had that problem since the beginning. Not too many Safari users out there, it seems… or, else, they’re shy! :) )

Well, I knew it displayed well in Firefox, IE and Opera, so I tried Konqueror, which is supposedly “closer” to Safari (which was originally based on KHTML). No problem there, either.

As I don’t have a Mac, I confirmed with another Mac user (thanks, Ricardo!) that there really was a problem (not that I doubted the guy, but it might be something only on his system), and, so, I started looking. Fire up the W3 CSS validator, and… it complained about this line:

font-size: 62,5%;

The problem, which you may already have spotted, is the comma: it should be a period (or should I say “dot”?) instead. My guess (which was correct) was that Safari was reading that as “625%”. So I changed the comma to a period, and… everything became smaller in Firefox! :shock:

Yes, Firefox (and every other browser except Safari, apparently) completely ignored that line because of the comma. Safari, on the other and, interpreted it without the comma.

Highly illogical, if you ask me… if you want to “do your best” to interpret code, the comma should be replaced by a dot, not completely removed. :) But it’s funny that the other browsers were ignoring that line, as well. I have since commented it out, as I had gotten used to a bigger font on PA. :)

Incidentally, every single Moonmoon installation probably has this bug. I’ll try to report it to the author.

That user-friendliness thing again

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

I was replying to the following comment by Bruno Rodrigues in the Firefox tab annoyances post, but I think that this deserves a new post; it’s a different subject, and longer than an average comment. :)

Uhhh? Obviously everyone *knew* that triple-click-control-middle-abcde-enter-enter-space(*) with your leg above your back would close a tab. What would *you* be thinking about? If Apple has close buttons on each tab, and not a single close at the right side, nor no-buttons at all, what do you think is the best user experience?

(*) did you know that most computer-savy users *still* don’t know about the right mouse button? Unbelievable, but true.

Two big problems tere, IMO. First, “triple-click-control-middle-abcde-enter-enter-space with your leg above your back” is a strawman attack. You can’t present something absurd as your opponent’s position, show that it is indeed absurd, and then pretend that you have refuted his original position as well. Middle-click is simple, quick and pratical, and your example isn’t. Sorry, I’ve been reading a lot about logical fallacies on Wikipedia. :)

Second, you seem to equate Apple with user-friendliness, which is an argument to authority: if Apple does it, then it must be correct. If Apple does it that way, then that must be the most user-friendly way possible.

Well, telling people about the middle button would be a much better idea than introducing multiple “dangerous” close buttons that only get in the way anyway… but maybe that’s just me.

Should the close buttons be added simply because Apple does it? Like I said, I don’t agree that Apple should be considered the “standard” for user-friendliness. If it was, then it would never change, would it? It would already be perfect. But it isn’t.

A thing should be as simple as possible, but not simpler (paraphrasing Einstein). If you take away usefulness (note that I don’t say “features”, but real usefulness) just to make it simpler, you’re making the software less useful. If the software doesn’t do what I want it to do, then it’s not useful to me, even if it’s the most easy to use piece of software in the world… right?

And, historically, that’s what Apple did (I admit that I haven’t used MacOS X yet, though I was familiar with previous versions). Their philosophy was: “normal” users should never need to do this, so we’ll actively prevent people from doing it – even if they happen to be advanced users. For some reason, I have a problem with this kind of attitude. To be fair, I don’t know if it’s changed in OS X.

Besides, “user-friendliness” is a subjective concept. To most people, the most important thing for a piece of software isn’t really being simple, clean, or logical, but simply being what they already know. Between Windows XP and MacOS X, they’d say Windows was more “user-friendly”, merely because, with MacOS, they’d have to learn new stuff – which is the thing people hate the most about computers.

The close buttons on tabs waste space, make it easy to close tabs by mistake, are harder to click on than the entire tab, and there was already a quicker, easier way to do it. People don’t know about it? Find a way to tell them. Hell, pop up an information window the first time a user opens a new tab, or something. It’s much better than adding a redundant, confusing feature that will only make the browser more difficult to use to anyone who already knew how to close tabs quickly.

What’s next? Take tabs away completely, because many people don’t know how to use them anyway, and they only make the browser “more confusing”?

Fixing tab annoyances in Firefox 2.0

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

Firefox 2.0 has been out for a while, and the response to it has been mostly positive.

However, there were a couple of changes to how tabs work, and I, for one, didn’t like them at all. Looking around, I found the solution to one of them, and the other one was pretty easy to figure out.

Here’s the changes, and how to “undo” them:

1- “X” close button on every tab

This one, to me, qualifies for the “What were they thinking?” award. :) Don’t people know that you can close any tab simply by middle-clicking on it (yes, even on Linux)? Not to mention that the “X” button is both harder to click on than the entire tab, and makes it easy to close tabs by mistake, when you just wanted to select it? In other words, there’s already an easy way, and they add a more difficult way, which, besides, can easy lead to mistakes?

Sigh. Sorry about the rant. :)

Fix: open about:config, look for browser.tabs.closeButtons, and set it to 2 (no close buttons) or 3 (a single close button on the right of the tabs, like in previous Firefoxes – though, again, middle-click makes it useless).

2- tabs don’t get smaller past a certain point; if you have too many, you need to scroll the tab bar to see them all

Maybe I’m weird, but I have tab folders with 10-15 bookmarks of a particular subject, and I like to open them all, with a single click, daily. In Firefox 1.x, the tabs would get as small as they needed to be, to fit in the window. Now, they don’t get smaller than a certain size, and force the user to scroll.

To me, this is annoying. I haven’t found an option to completely disable this behavior, but I can make it virtually go away by reducing the minimum tab width to a much smaller value.

Fix: open about:config, and change browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to a much smaller value, like 1.

Nintendo DS Browser – my review

Friday, October 20th, 2006

Nintendo DS Browser

Well, I’ve had it for a couple of days now. As far as I know, it hasn’t yet been released in Portugal, but I ordered it from Amazon.co.uk.

If you’ve used Opera Mobile version 8.x, you have an idea of what to expect, as the browser (while it has the “Opera” brand, it’s referred to as “Nintendo DS Browser”) is mostly the same, with the necessary changes for the different hardware, naturally.

The biggest problem, in my opinion, is this: it’s a bit slow. Not unbearably so, but scrolling is far from smooth, especially on more complex pages. It also loads and renders them slower than you’re probably used to, even with a fast connection. It’s usable, sure, but it’s far from the experience of using Firefox on a PC, of course. In fact, Opera in my Nokia 6630 is faster than this one (but, then, modern cell phones are more powerful, hardware-wise, than a DS).

The browser has two vieweing modes: Small Screen Rendering mode (SSR), and Overview mode. The first works mostly like the mobile version: it ensures that you never have to scroll horizontally, by making every frame / column appear on top of each other. You can read pages perfectly, but you lose a lot of the formatting. One problem is that in sites with a menu on the left, the entire menu appears before the content, which means you have to scroll down a lot to start reading. Anyway, this mode is perfectly fine for reading blogs, for instance, but a forum (such as a phpBB one) is more complicated.

Overview mode shows the entire page with the original formatting. You see a “zoomed out” version on one of the screens, and a zoomed in section on the other. You can drag the zoomed in part with the stylus, of course. This way, you can see a site with its original look, but navigation becomes more difficult.

Personally, I stay in SSR mode most of the time, except when a site really requires its original formatting. One interesting example is GameKnot, an online chess server. With Overview mode and maximum zoom out, you can actually have the entire chess board on the clickable screen, and make your moves with the stylus! I’ve tried it and it works, which shows that Javascript support is acceptable.

You can write using a virtual keyboard, in the same way you write your name in a game, or use handwriting recognition. I didn’t like the latter; maybe it’s because I’m used to my old Palm, which recognizes characters differently. Many times, it didn’t recognize the letter I typed, and I’ve found no way to write accented characters. Anyway, the virtual keyboard works quite well, and you can certainly write faster than using T9 in a cell phone.

One problem, though: maybe it’s because this is the UK version, instead of a localized Portuguese one, but, as far as I can see, there is no way to write vowels like A and O with a tilde, like “ã” or “õ”. The browser shows them perfectly in pages, but they’re not available on the virtual keyboard. You can select which national keyboard you want (US, UK, SP, etc.), but there’s no Portuguese one. Maybe it’ll be available when (and if) they release the browser here. It’s not the end of the world, but it can be annoying if you want to use it for writing or commenting in Portuguese sites or blogs.

Personally, I use this browser mostly for reading in bed (blogs and other sites). :) It’s much more comfortable to use the small, light DS than a comparatively huge and heavy laptop. And I don’t currently have one of those, anyway. :)

No Java or Flash, but I don’t miss them. :)

It saves bookmarks and the browser configuration to the card, but not cookies or files. Cookies are lost when you turn the DS off, which means that you have to log in again in any site you access. A little annoying, but, as I said, you can write usernames and passwords quickly using the virtual keyboard.

So far, it hasn’t crashed once.

There are two versions, one for the old DS (“Phat”), and another for the DS Lite. The reason is that the browser comes with a memory expansion, which is inserted into the GBA port, and they include a smaller one for the DS Lite, which doesn’t stick out of the port (like GBA games do). The Phat version works on both DSs (sticking out of the GBA port on the Lite), but the Lite version is for the Lite only.

Curiously, this isn’t out in the US yet… one of the few times us Europeans got a better deal. :)

Flash 9 for Linux (beta) is finally available

Thursday, October 19th, 2006

(seen on ruimoura.net)

At last! Until recently, the newest version was Flash 7, which is only a couple of years old. But now you can download the Flash 9 beta, which is working perfectly here (SUSE 10.1)!

Now I can enter TotalWar.com again! :)

EDIT: just switched back to Flash 7. Some pages, such as this one, made the browser hang for several seconds each time I switched to that tab – and that’s in a fast computer. It seems the “beta” label is well deserved. :(


Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal
This work by Pedro Timóteo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal.