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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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”?

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.

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.

(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.

In Firefox, on Windows, it’s quite useful to be able to close tabs by middle-clicking on them. But on Linux, by default, what middle-click does (either on the tab or on the main page display) is to open whatever is on the clipboard in the current tab.

But you may prefer middle-click to work as in the Windows version. If so, just open about:config, then search for

middlemouse.contentLoadURL

and change it to False. Simple as that.

First, Windows Live Messenger (formely MSN Messenger) is out.

I’ve only tried it out for a minute, and all of my contacts were still using MSN Messenger 7.5. Still full of ads, but there’s a Mess.be patch to remove them, and tinker with it, which I haven’t installed yet, but I’ve used the MSN 7.5 version for months, and it made it bearable.

One new feature: you can talk to people while “appearing offline”, now. Of course, they’ll instantly realize that you aren’t really offline…

Second, Opera 9 is finally out. Lots of new stuff to explore. It passes the ACID2 test, and is still by far the fastest modern browser in the world. Firefox is still my primary browser, but Opera is a joy to use. Also (via Pedro Fonseca), a list of 10 features you’ll find only in Opera. Note that all of them are for version 8.0 – the new version has even more unique features.

One hundred and fifty million! Niiice!

(source: SpreadFirefox)

And no, they don’t count re-downloads. Nor can they count installations from CDs, or operating systems, such as Linux distros, which include Firefox.

Use “Check for Updates” in the Help menu, or simply wait for it to warn you. If, for some reason, you are not using Firefox, you can get it from Getfirefox.com.

Just bugfixes, so should be a peaceful update for everyone. I’m already using it on XP, at home, and will update it on Linux, at work, tomorrow.

I’m a couple of days late, as I don’t use it myself; however, in those couple of days, I’ve seen, or read about, several people who do use the Mozilla suite, yet hadn’t known about the name change.

So, if you want to keep using Mozilla (not Firefox), it’s now called SeaMonkey, and the 1.0 version is out – which includes many engine improvements from Firefox 1.5 (but it’s still the suite, with the same look and feel, not a stand-alone browser like Firefox).

I have yet to try it out, but, apparently, the new version of the Performancing Firefox extension is great. It allows you to blog directly from Firefox, without going into your blog’s administration pages.

I’m quite busy at work today, but I’ll try to install it later, and write some first impressions about it.

Meanwhile, here’s the new features list:

• More Technorati Support
• Delicious integration
• Trackback support (including auto-discovery)
• Draft support (and default to draft option)
• Ping support
• Statusbar Icon Enhancments (drag and drop)
• More Settings Options
• Full metaWeblog API implementation, now working in Roller, blogharbor, and many more
• Lots of Bug Fixes:
  • Logging in from account wizard now times out if connection fails
  • More informative Blogger.com error reporting
  • Hitting a tab twice no longer looses data.
  • Less confusing automatic technorati tag adding
  • Numerous metaWeblog API fixes
  • Edit post now conserves original dateCreated parameter
  • Issues with setting and editing categories (drupal still has issues).
  • New posts no longer created when editing a post (on WP)
  • Preview links now open in a new tab
  • Spaces are now possible in technorati tags
  • WordPress 2.0 support
  • Many more small bugs

According to PCPro, yes.

This bit is intriguing:

As many of the engineers involved in the Firefox project are now also working for Google, it comes as no surprise to discover that improvements are planned for the integration with search. The objective is for the browser to adapt to the user’s search needs, rather than forcing a particular view of search on them.

Version 2.0 is expected to create a simple, flexible system that unifies all search back ends, make adding keywords easy and more obvious, allow for engines to be added and removed easily when upgrading and allow for simple configuration for business needs.

Among other things, they also mention “improvements to the tabbed browsing and other user interface enhancements”. Should be interesting…

20% is a really nice number. Not only because, well, it’s a lot of people, but because, unlike the MS fanboys/apologists usually say, Firefox isn’t just used by “geeks” or “technical people”.

Because, sure as hell, geeks (and I consider myself one) don’t comprise 20% of the world’s population. Not even 5%.

This proves that ordinary, non-technically inclined people are also capable of being aware of Internet Explorer’s many problems and lack of modern features, and when aware of alternatives (and here I have to praise Spread Firefox for doing a great job in letting people know that “Internet Explorer” is not “The Internet”), can actually switch.

(Source: XiTi. It’s in French, but the images speak for themselves.)

Really, what else do you need before you switch to a decent browser such as Firefox, Opera, Konqueror or Safari?

Using IE these days goes far beyond “not caring about tech stuff”. It’s more in the realm of covering your ears with your hands, and singing “la la la, I can’t year you!”. It’s intentional ignorance mixed with a great deal of stubbornness.

It’s just plain dumb.

Source: Mário Lopes

Google has just released a new extension for Firefox, Blogger Web Comments, which shows a small (configurable) popup showing blog articles (which they get from Google Blog Search) that mention the page you’re currently viewing.

I’ve only been using it for 3 minutes or so, so I still haven’t thought about the implications of, basically, for each page you browse to, getting a list of blog articles talking about it. I think it could actually change the browsing habits of a lot of people. A reasonable way to put it might be: “what if every single page in the world had easily accessible comments – and not controlled by the page’s owner?”

It could become annoying, though – I’ll have to wait and see. It can be hidden or temporarily disabled, of course. Or uninstalled, naturally – this isn’t Internet Explorer.

(seen on ProBlogger)

The ugly:

You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. It “works”, so you launch it. You lose 20% of your potential clients, and more of 50% of the “tech-savvy” ones.

The bad:

You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. You see that your site doesn’t work in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and/or Safari, so you waste days trying to fix hundreds of HTML bugs. After that, you find that it no longer works properly in IE 6, so you end up using Javascript to detect the browser, and giving different versions of code to each. You curse those pesky Firefox / Opera / Konqueror / Safari “weirdos”, who just have to be “different”, refusing to use the “standard browser,” Internet Explorer, and only increase your workload.

The good:

You code a web site according to standards, which, assuming you didn’t make any mistakes, means that it works in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari. You test it in IE, and find that some parts don’t work properly due to IE bugs or lack of support for parts of some standards, so you work around those — sticking to the standards — and ensure that it works in IE as well. Again, assuming you didn’t make mistakes, it still works perfectly in the standards-compliant browsers. Furthermore, the site degrades gracefully (that is, it may not have all the bells and whistles, but it works, and all the content is accessible) in cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs, Sony PSPs, etc..

Seen on ProBlogger, an interesting report: Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox 1.5 Now. It’s not really a tech report, but, instead, a report for marketers.

Which I am not. But I found it intriguing anyway – seeing how “the other side” thinks, and which arguments can affect them (since they’re not that concerned with “the standards” or “doing things right”, or even “using and supporting the best software”, like I am.)

I thought it might be interesting to compare which Red Panda extensions we use… we may learn about some we didn’t know existed.

Here are mine:

• SearchStatus: shows PageRank and Alexa ranks for the current site on the status bar; you can also right click on them to go several information pages on the respective sites.
• ForecastFox: weather information; highly customizable.
• BugMeNot: accesses a “throwaway” username/password database to enter stupid “registration required” sites (mostly news ones) quickly, without having to give them the most intimate details of your life.
• AdSense Notifier: gives almost real time stats for your AdSense earnings; also allows quick logon to the AdSense site
• CuteMenus: Crystal SVG: adds nice colorful icons to Firefox’s menus; becomes more user-friendly and pleasant to use
• SEOpen: adds many SEO options to the context menu, such as checking for backlinks in several search engines, and more
• del.icio.us: adds quick and comprehensive del.icio.us integration to the Fox

OK, your turn.

I wondered why I didn’t get the auto-update prompt, and so I went and got the 1.5 final version from the FTP site. I installed it, and… the build number is exactly the same as RC3. Which means, apparently, that 1.5RC3 and 1.5 final are the same!

This is what a release candidate should be – a candidate for the final version, which, if no new bugs are discovered, becomes the final version (otherwise, those bugs are fixed, and a second RC is released). But I’ve got so much used to the fact that “release candidate”, to most software authors, means just “what comes after beta” or “we can’t keep calling them betas forever”, that I didn’t even think that they would be using the term properly here!