Following monday’s post a colleague of mine sent me the below picture. Although I’ll grant you it is oversimplifying things more than a bit, it still has a vein of truth in it, not to mention the fact that it is more than slightly amusing…
Tag: webbrowsers
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Opera revisited
It’s been a while since I last wrote of my trying out Opera. Since then, my tech-savvy friend has taken it upon himself to bring me into the light. A calm evening of beer and pizza quickly turned into just that, with the addendum of him prodding me to use Opera in no uncertain terms. Indeed, so much so that he convinced me to download and install Opera to my EeePC so that I could see the marvels of Opera in all their splendour.
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Google Chrome – First impressions
Web search and advertising giant Google has gone against what seemed to be a foregone conclusion by not only not buying the norwegian web browser development firm Opera software, but also publishing their own web browser, called Chrome. They’ve built it on Web Kit, the same rendering engine used by Apple’s Safari, and added their own JVM (Java Virtual Machine).
The first thing I noticed when I’d installed Chrome was how shiny it was, how eyecandy-y it was. The second thing I noticed was its lack of a “stop” button. That was it though. I didn’t notice any obvious usability flaws. There were no illogical keyboard shortcuts.
Even so, it does seem somewhat underdeveloped. Chrome is a very early Beta considering other Beta projects of Google’s. To me, it immediately felt a bit like Windows XP’s default skin, that is to say, I think it looks a bit like they’ve teamed up with Fisher Price to create My First Browser.
Like my conclusions on Apple’s Safari and Opera, I like it, but I can’t really see it substituting my current default, Mozilla Firefox. -
Firefox 3 – First impressions
On June 18th, 2008, some eight and a half million people downloaded the latest version of Mozilla Firefox. A powerful browser, built on the Gecko engine its greatest advantage is the fact that it is so easily expandable and customizable through powerful add-ons.
There are a few new features that are most decidedly practical. One of them is a “Verified by” function, which simply means that when you are visiting say, a Microsoft site, the addressbar shines up like this:
Another nifty function is the “Most Visited” button, which lists your ten most visited websites:
The password-saving feature is still there, but comes up as a noticebar, instead of a dialog box:
Designwise, the changes are minor, but noticeable. There are new buttons, like so:
All in all, Firefox 3 seems to be a decent browser, and it simply works, which is always nice. By the by, everyone who downloaded Firefox 3 in the first 24 hours were part of a world record setting event, and got to download a Download Day certificate like this:
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Firefox: Disabling the Extension Install Delay
In a previous blogpost I wrote about my favorite Firefox extensions. One thing that annoys me though, is that whenever I try to install an extension, Firefox shows a dialog box, and grays out the “install” button for three seconds, like this:
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Testing Opera – first impressions
A friend of mine whose tech savvy is usually worth listening to waxed religious about Opera the other night. When he does, there’s usually a good reason, so I decided to check it out.
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Branding Internet Explorer
Like me, you’ve probably been using the internet for a while, and may have noticed that sometimes Internet Explorer has a “provided by”-tag, looking something like this:
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Safari for Windows – first impressions
I like trying out new pieces of software, and when Apple released Safari for Windows I had no choice but to try it out. First impression is that it is most definitely an Apple product, and bears great resemblance to e.g. iTunes. It is a sleek piece of software, and it seems to be sturdy enough.
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Firefox 2.0.0.13 crashes, unable to add extensions part two – the solution
My problems have, as I mentioned, been twofold; first there is the universal problem of not being able to add extensions, and second there is the problem of Firefox crashing on one of my machines.
The error data for the crashes look like this:
AppName: firefox.exe
AppVer: 1.8.20080.31114
ModName: firefox.exe
ModVer: 1.8.20080.31114
Offset: 0019e219
I decided to do a fresh reinstall of Firefox, but wanting to keep my profile, with all my bookmarks etc., I exported the profile folder (as detailed in the Mozilla Knowledgebase). I then uninstalled Firefox, and then reinstalled Firefox. I then imported the profile folder, and I am now able to install extensions, though the problems with the crashes remain. This seems to be caused by the profile, and I created a new profile accordingly.
To create a new profile, I ran the command “firefox.exe -ProfileManager”, and created a new profile. I copied files as detailed in the Mozilla Knowledge base article on recovering data from an old profile, and restarted firefox with the new profile, taking care to delete the old one. Some data was lost, but most of my preferences survived.
The install of Firefox was an updated and patched one, originally installed as 2.0.0.5 or something like that. Most likely problem was caused by my install of Firefox having been updated and patched instead of reinstalled.
To resolve this problem, I relied heavily on the following Mozilla Firefox Knowledgebase articles: (more…) -
Firefox 2.0.0.13 crashes, unable to add extensions part one – the problem
I’ve been using Firefox for a few years now, and love it dearly. After the update to version 2.0.0.13, I have experienced the following problems with it:
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