Insanity Part 2.0

I’ve been using Firefox 3 alphas, betas, and RCs off and on for several months now, and I’m looking forward for the final release of Firefox 3. It’s a fantastic release and has really come together in the past several months, and I think anyone who’s ever used Firefox or even thought about using it should download it as soon as it’s released.

Thus, I bring to you a non-comprehensive listing of things I love that are new to Firefox 3, in no particular order.

• OS X-consistent window chrome theme
• Aqua form controls and buttons
• The Awesome Bar (this cannot be overemphasized enough)
• Overall speed and performance increases
• Quartz font-rendering on OS X, bringing with it OS consistent font smoothing!

Things that I love in Firefox 3, but where credit deserves to go somewhere else:

• AdBlock Plus

Things that I wish were in Firefox 3, but sadly aren’t:

• Text responds to CMD-CTRL-D for the dictionary pop-up (bug 301451)
• In-browser PDF Reader plugin (no, Adobe’s plugin does not work)

Try a sneak peek of Firefox 3 right now by downloading a release candidate build. As always with pre-releases, the intent is to figure out what significant but unknown bugs are before general release, so if this idea makes you squeamish you should probably avoid it for now.

Proto for Mac OS X :: Firefox Add-ons

Awesome new theme for Firefox 3 Mac users – only works for the latest nightly builds. Much more Leopard-like than the default theme. It’s hoping to be included as the default theme for OS X Firefox builds, but it’s only a preview at this point.

Just downloaded a Camino nightly build, and I noticed that Camino’s also picked up the Cairo work that’s been going into the Firefox nightlies lately. This is good news for those that like having a Gecko browser but want something a little more OS X-y than Firefox is. Looks like the days of crappy font rendering in OS X Gecko are slowly coming to an end

I’ve set up a few redirects and things on my website in order to make various aspects of my life easier. Being a nice guy, I’m going to share them with the Internet, and presumably friends that would read this blog

Cornell uses Deep Freeze so that upon every reboot, every file and program that was added since the last known good state (a “freeze”) is removed. I’ve seen some hacks around this, but by and large it works pretty well. It’s pretty cool because it means that all the public lab machines don’t have any of the crud you’d normally associate with a lab machine (eg shitty programs like Limewire or something equally useless that some other person installed).

Unfortunately, the default image doesn’t include Mozilla Firefox, which means that upon every reboot I have to download the installer so I can get some Mozilla goodness. There’s a couple of ways around this:

1. Re-Download from mozilla.com every time. This’ll work, but it has the added downside of artificially inflating their download numbers.
2. Put the installer on a USB Key. Kind of slow because Windows has to do that whole “Installing Hardware” song and dance before it’ll even let you use the installer.
3. Put Portable Firefox on a USB key. Same deal as above except it’s even slower, but you get the added benefit of having your saved passwords and bookmarks

My solution has become “download directly from FTP server because the network is faster than a USB key, and download a nightly because those could always use some testing goodness.”

To that end, here’s the links I’ve been using:

http://stealthgenius.com/f.exe – latest released version of firefox
http://stealthgenius.com/f/ – latest branch nightly (not changing frequently now at 2.0x)
http://stealthgenius.com/f/t/ – latest trunk nightly (frequently changing)
http://stealthgenius.com/putty.exe – latest putty, so I don’t have to google search for it every time

Blake Ross on Netscape 8

Excellent post by Blake Ross on how much Netscape 8 sucks. Although I’m glad to see a new Netscape release based on Firefox, I wish it didn’t suck so much. The tab preferences UI is absolutely atrocious (there’s seriously about 20 different options you can change), as is the default UI too. The standard window is incredibly cluttered, as it has so many buttons and things all over the place (as well as a cluttered ‘multi-bar’ that just functions as advertising for Netscape.com and its marketing partners) that it’s far far too busy and crowded.

Blake’s second post on the problems of Netscape8 deal mostly with the really bad idea of incorporating the Windows IE engine into Netscape. Although it would be helpful for users that have problems sometimes (eg with finicky banks), I would look at it as more of a fallback option instead of something that should be a prominent fixture of the program. Instead, Netscape chooses to make IE the engine for a number of ‘pre-approved’ sites chosen by AOL (or a different partner) because of their safe-ness. This is utterly ridiculous. Firefox wouldn’t be making a difference on the internet if it was simply another IE-implementation. It is on these ‘safe’ sites that Firefox has absolutely no problem displaying correctly, and where there is simply no need for the ability to display with IE.

I would imagine the line of thinking was that “Firefox is safer, so let’s use IE on the safe sites and Firefox for anything else that could pose a danger!” Instead, this just leads to a messy program, with pointless options that a user won’t understand, like “Display like Netscape” (“I thought I was already using Netscape!”) or “security zones” (users didn’t understand zones when they were using IE, why would they understand it with Netscape?)