The Tlog - a technology blog » Windows software

Firefox 3.0b5!

Pedro Timóteo — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:01:56 +0000

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

Pedro Timóteo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:58:33 +0000

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.

That user-friendliness thing again

Pedro Timóteo — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:39:49 +0000

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

Pedro Timóteo — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:11:22 +0000

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.

Assorted new releases

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 10:31:06 +0000

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.

Windows Live Messenger final: tomorrow?

Pedro Timóteo — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:53:35 +0000

According to mess.be, yes.

If you don’t know about it, it’s the next version of the software previously known as “MSN Messenger”, which most Portuguese refer to as either “MSN” or “Messenger”, never realizing that MSN is something else, and that there are other messengers.

And here are some of its new features, and some screenshots, too.

Quick HTML page creation

Pedro Timóteo — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 10:28:29 +0000

A couple of days ago, I needed to create a basic, static HTML page, with mostly text and a couple of images, for another mini-site. I usually create those by hand, using a simple text editor; however, when the page is longer, it can be annoying to remember to close all the tags, replace every accented character with the proper ampersand code (e.g. á is á), and so on. In other words, it’s tiresome, because you can’t simply write the content.

On the other hand, I tend to dislike WYSIWYG HTML editors, as they, mostly, create “write-only code”. All I needed was for it to do what I said in the paragraph above: create the paragraphs automatically, replace the accented characters, and so on. And, also, create simple, readable, easily editable HTML, without adding unneeded stuff. In other words, what WordPress already does… but I didn’t want to use WordPress for that; it was to be a simple, static page.

I was pleasantly surprised with Nvu. It did exactly what I wanted, and the generated HTML was clean and virtually perfect – so much that, after I generated the initial version, I never touched Nvu again, it’s perfectly readable in a text editor.

(you can find the mini-site here, but, be warned, it’s in Portuguese, though an English version is coming soon.)

I’m guessing that Mozilla Composer (from SeaMonkey) would work equally as well, though I don’t have it installed.

Old and improved: Spyware Prevention and Removal Guide

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:50:43 +0000

To coincide with my 3rd press release , I updated, and expanded a little, this very blog’s second (and first “real”) post ever, Avoiding and Removing Spyware.

It’s not rocket science, of course, but, just by doing what I’ve written there, and without spending a cent, my Windows XP installation from 2003 (on my home desktop / gaming PC) still “lives”, without the usual “my PC has been getting slower and slower… time for another reformat” crap.

Firefox: 150 000 000 downloads!

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 18:42:15 +0000

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.

Firefox 1.5.0.1 is out

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 23:07:11 +0000

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.

SeaMonkey 1.0 released

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:43:27 +0000

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).

MySQL 5.0

Pedro Timóteo — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 10:59:29 +0000

On a whim, I upgraded MySQL on my server to 5.0.18. No problems so far, unlike 4.1.x, which had a few troubles with OpenBSD. It still has the bug where (when compiling in OpenBSD) the client libraries link to ../libmysql/.libs/libmysqlclient.so.15.0 instead of simply -lmysqlclient, but I simply had to repeat the compilations in the client/ subdirectory, replacing the former with the latter.

As far as I can see, there are no problems with current versions of WordPress, MediaWiki and phpBB, all of which I use here.

Firefox 2.0 alpha coming soon?

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:55:14 +0000

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…

Firefox: 20% in Europe, 15% in the U.S.!

Pedro Timóteo — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 08:52:32 +0000

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.)

Thunderbird 1.5 relased

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 12:12:32 +0000

Much like Firefox, the last RC – in this case, 1.5 RC 2 – is the same as the final version. If you already have that one, you have the latest Thunderbird.

For everyone else, you can get Thunderbird here.

Apache 2.2.0 is out

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:36:27 +0000

The number one web server on the Internet has a new stable version, 2.2.0. The previous stable version was 2.0.55.

New features include Smart Filtering, Improved Caching, AJP Proxy, Proxy Load Balancing, Graceful Shutdown support, Large File Support, the Event MPM, and refactored Authentication/Authorization.

I’ll keep using OpenBSD’s customized 1.3.29, here, which comes as part of the OS. OpenBSD isn’t moving to 2.x because of licensing issues. But I’m betting most Linux distros will include Apache 2.2.x in their next versions.

Firefox 1.5 final!!!

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 08:25:38 +0000

Yup, it’s here, as everyone else has already mention (don’t these guys sleep? ). Auto-update should trigger at any time (unless you’re still using that horrid thing that came with the computer, which you probably call “the internet”… but then, what are you doing on this site if you’re such a technophobe?). You can also get it from the official FTP site, if you’re in a hurry.

From the Mozillazine post:

Firefox 1.5 introduces several new features, including an improved software update system, faster Back / Forward page navigation, a new options to clear private browsing data, drag-and-drop reordering of browser tabs, a redesigned Options/Preferences window and more robust popup blocking. Standards support is also improved, with support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), JavaScript 1.6 and additional CSS properties. Accessibility is much improved (including new DHTML accessibility features), security has been enhanced and Mac OS X support has also been improved.

As any regular reader knows, I’ve been using 1.5 versions since the betas (which came before 3 release candidates), and even then they already worked better than the 1.0.x versions. So go get 1.5 without any fears of “using bleeding edge software”.

PHP 5.1.0

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 15:46:31 +0000

It’s out (saw it on André Costa’s blog). I’m already using it here; so far, so good, except that eAccelerator no longer wants to compile – I could try to muck around the source, but I’m in a lazy mood, so I’ll wait for a future version, and use PHP without it for a while.

EDIT: spoke too soon: Drupal 4.6.3 doesn’t seem to like it. Oh well…

Firefox 1.5 RC3

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:08:08 +0000

One more release candidate. If everything goes well, this will be the last.

No big changes since RC 2, just fixes for a couple of crash bugs.

If you’re using a previous RC, the auto-update has probably already warned you about this. If you’re still using 1.0.x, you can probably wait a couple of days and update to the final 1.5.

Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 2

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 08:42:14 +0000

It’s out. Auto-update (really “auto”, I didn’t even use “Check for Updates”) worked perfectly this time: this morning I fired up Firefox, browsed through a couple of usual sites, and after a couple of minutes I got a window saying it had downloaded an “important update” and needed to be restarted to complete the update (though I could optionally keep using the older version for any time I wanted until I restarted it, of course).

According to what’s on the FTP site, the upgrade from RC1 to RC2 was 390 KB. Not too bad.

Thunderbird 1.5 RC 1 released

Pedro Timóteo — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 10:42:10 +0000

Ricardo got there first this time. Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 RC1 is out, and can be downloaded here. Or you can try the auto-update.

I’m using it right now, at work (on Linux).

Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1!

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:40:10 +0000

My Firefox has just updated itself to 1.5 RC1. Seems to be pretty new – so far, neither Mozillazine not Slashdot have mentioned it yet. This may have changed when you read this, though.

From the release notes, it’s just bug fixes. Which are always a good idea.

Auto-update should work – to me, it did. If not, you can go to the Help menu and select “Check for Updates”. If you’re really desperate… nah, you shouldn’t be. Testing the auto-update system is good.

Note that the About box says it’s version “1.5″, but it’s not – it’s a release candidate. Then again, from my experience the 1.5 pre-release versions are already more stable than 1.0.7, not to mention faster, with a better Preferences interface, and the ability to re-order tabs by dragging them.

MySQL 5.0

Pedro Timóteo — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:50:25 +0000

MySQL 5.0 is out (saw the news here). Haven’t tried it yet, since the 4.1 version didn’t like OpenBSD very much, and the OpenBSD port is still at 4.0.x (which I’m using, among other things, for my blogs). I may, however, try out 5.0 after I upgrade OpenBSD to 3.8, hopefully in November.

(yes, I could have downloaded a binary from MySQL themselves, but I prefer to compile from source, even if using a port.)

Anyway, from the MySQL site:

MySQL 5.0 delivers dozens of new enterprise features, including:

Stored Procedures and SQL Functions — to embed business logic in the database and improve performance;
Triggers — to enforce complex business rules at the database level;
Views — to ensure protection of sensitive information;
Cursors — to allow easier database development and reference of large datasets;
Information Schema — to provide easy access to metadata;
XA Distributed Transactions — supports complex transactions across multiple databases in heterogeneous environments;
SQL Mode — provides server-enforced data integrity for new and existing data;
New Federated and Archive Storage Engines — MySQL’s unique pluggable storage engine architecture allows greater flexibility, functionality and performance by making it easy to swap database engines in and out, based on users’ application requirements;
New Migration Toolkit — A new graphical toolkit that completely migrates all data and objects from Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access and other database platforms to MySQL;
Instance Manager — new management assistant that allows remote starting/stopping of any MySQL Server, as well as remote editing of configuration files, reading of error and query logs, and more;
Updated Connectors and Visual Tools — new high-performance versions of MySQL’s ODBC, Java and .NET database drivers are now available, along with updated versions of the MySQL Query Browser and MySQL Administrator.

I have to admit (and call me a zealot for having a sense of ethics, I’m used to it ) that I’d move to PostgreSQL in a minute, if WordPress supported it, because of MySQL’s recent deal with SCO. That was just plain wrong.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 released

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 13:40:33 +0000

OK, I’m a day late, and every blog in existence has already announced it, but… OpenOffice.org 2.0 is out. Looks and “feels” much better than the 1.x versions. I haven’t tried doing so, because I’m not much of an Office user, but people are saying that OO.org 2.0 reads old MS Office documents better than new MS Office versions do!

Whether you’re using Windows or Linux, you should really try this (assuming you need an Office suite at all – I, for one, use it only about half a dozen times a year). It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it opens your old documents. It’s not harder to move from any MS Office to OO.org than it is to move from MS Office 97 to 2003, for instance.

Also, it supports OpenDocument, which MS Office doesn’t (at least yet). That may well turn out to be the format of the future…

One hundred million!

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 18:31:02 +0000

And on the 19th of October, 2005…

Not bad…

(news from SpreadFirefox)