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?

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.

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.

As everyone should know, Internet Explorer is a very insecure browser, and daily use can quickly turn a Microsoft Windows PC into a spyware-ridden, spam-sending slow, unstable abomination.

I don’t use IE at home, because Mozilla Firefox is infinitely better and more secure, but I’ve found that many people, even those otherwise educated and intelligent, think of “the Internet” as “the blue E”, and, when wanting to open a site, open IE without thinking.

So I had to do something about it.

Now, while I think that (as of mid-2005) it is still to early to implement this as official policy in a company (many bad sites or incompetently-designed intranet applications only work with IE – and sometimes only with a particular version), it can be useful in many home / small office networks.

Requirements

• a Unix-like machine (e.g. GNU/Linux or OpenBSD), possibly with 2 network cards, already running as a gateway for your network (this part is beyond the scope of this article)
• a firewall running on that machine (I use OpenBSD’s pf, but Linux’s iptables would also work) (again, firewall instructions go beyond the scope of this article)
• a Squid proxy server installation on the same machine, with the desired access configuration (including, possibly, authentication and such).

Steps

1. configure your firewall not to allow direct HTTP (ports 80 and 443) and FTP (port 21) from the internal network (otherwise, users could just disable the proxy in the browser)
2. change your Squid configuration like this:

   Before the “allow” for your home network, insert the following:

   acl msie browser MSIE
   acl getmozilla dstdomain .spreadfirefox.com
   acl getmozilla dstdomain .getfirefox.com
   # firefox download places always have "mozilla" in the URL
   acl getmozilla2 url_regex mozilla
   
   # the following use IE's engine
   # magic online
   acl exceptions_ie dstdomain .wizards.com
   # jre updates
   acl exceptions_ie dstdomain .java.sun.com
   acl exceptions_ie dstdomain .jdl.sun.com
   # stardock central
   acl exceptions_ie dstdomain .stardock.com
   # city of heroes
   acl exceptions_ie dstdomain .coh.com
   acl exceptions_ie dstdomain .cityofheroes.com
   acl windowsupdate dstdomain .windowsupdate.microsoft.com
   
   deny_info ERR_BAD_BROWSER msie
   
   http_access allow msie windowsupdate
   http_access allow msie getmozilla
   http_access allow msie getmozilla2
   http_access allow msie exceptions_ie
   http_access deny msie
   

   The exceptions are for some applications which (foolishly) use IE’s engine and identify themselves as it. You may not need these, and require different ones.

You should also create an ERR_BAD_BROWSER file (on the share/errors/English directory) for telling users that they’re using an insecure browser, and that IE is only for Windows Update, and for downloading Firefox. For example, here is mine:


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE>ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved</TITLE>
<STYLE type="text/css"><!--BODY{background-color:#ffffff; font-family:verdana, sans-serif}PRE{font-family:sans-serif}-->
</STYLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>ERROR</H1>
<H2>The requested URL could not be retrieved</H2>
<HR noshade size="1px">
<P>
While trying to retrieve the URL:
<A HREF="%U">%U</A>
<P>
The following error was encountered:
<UL>
<LI>
<STRONG>
Insecure browser detected.
</STRONG>
<P>
Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) is an insecure browser, and I don't like it
being used in
my home. :) MSIE, and MSIE-based browsers such as AvantBrowser or NetCaptor,
can only be used for <a href="http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com">Windows
Update</a>, or for downloading <a
href="http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&id=2703&t=49">Mozilla
Firefox</a>.</p>
<p>Please use a more secure browser such as <a
href="http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&id=2703&t=49">Firefox</a> or Opera.
</UL>
<P>Your cache administrator is <A HREF="mailto:%w">%w</A>.


Addendum

Yes, the user agent string can be changed. But I’m counting on the fact that most IE users don’t even know what a “browser” is – they think that “the Internet is the blue E”, and that clicking on it is “opening the Internet” as mentioned before. I’m also counting on the fact that anyone who is technically knowledgeable enough to change IE’s user agent is also knowledgeable enough not to want to use IE.

Addendum #2

“Why not simply download Firefox and tell people to use it?”, you may ask.

It’s not that easy – even at MY place, guests tend to “click on the blue E” without thinking, even after I’ve told them about Firefox. It’s a difficult habit to break for many people. And I don’t believe in “fooling” them by disguising Firefox with a IE theme and switching the icon.

Besides, a lot of software uses the IE engine “under the hood”. You can fall victim to an IE hole even if you never open IE yourself.