in with the new
It’s been a while since I remember having some substantial free time. Being immersed in the nitty gritty of a fledgeling company can do this to your spare time. Small wonder that ten things I hate about crunch time at a startup struck a chord. For extra points, the first six comments are both hilarious and sadly true.
So last week, due to incidents both within and outside my control, I decided to step back and smell the daisies, as it were.
This week, I’m still inhaling the fresh scent of daisies while doing the job I signed up to do and life has gotten a whole lot less stressful. Much to my amazement and horror (no, not really), I actually had time to tinker with the new Firefox. Yup, didn’t run the alphas, the preview releases or anything. The first new Firefox I’m running is 2.0 RC2. For a person who liked to roll their own Firefox and had a finely tuned mozconfig going, this is a sad sad state of affairs.
So, the newness. To be perfectly fair, my persistent memory leak problems with the 1.5 series didn’t completely go away despite assiduous leak monitoring and swapping out bad extensions for “better” ones. So, what I really wanted with this Firefox was a fresh start - a way to get rid of the 600+ mb bloat that would build up after a few days of continuous running. My first try at a solution: only four extensions installed thus far. I’ve even dispensed with Greasemonkey although the user scripts that I wrote may drive me back eventually. I like the new Firefox look, overall. I do not like the close button on each tab; but I’m not going to risk a new extension just to get rid of it. The network connections button has now changed location; in fact the whole preference UI has been revamped. No more SessionSaver or TMP for me; the builtin session saver functionality seems to work - and I am trying to trim down the extensions anyway. So what if the context menu seems a bit crowded? I can get used to that.
The theme installation seems rather braindead to me, but then I usually run the default theme … installed Blue Orbit just to try it out. Wanted me to restart Firefox (ok, fair enough), but didn’t switch to the new theme on startup. Years (yes, really) of Smart Bookmarks vanished because I used a brand new profile for the new Firefox. Needed an import to get that stuff in. Overall, this update seems a bit lighter and faster but that’s probably because I had 30+ tabs open on my old, creaky Firefox 1.5.0.7 and I still have a piddling 8 open on this. Give it time, give it time. I’ll drag it down from this blazingly fast response to a more tolerable crawl in due time. The huge wins in the user interface, however, were the scrolling tab bar (it actually works now? Or was it just that TMP was interfering with it before?) and the list of available tabs. There is also an intriguing feature that allows use of cursor keys on any page for navigation; but it behaves weirdly on links and artifacts on a page, so I disabled it after a few hours.
In other news, I happily amused myself by watching the entire first episode of Lost season 3 on Youtube. In 10 minute chunks. Yes, it’s out there folks. I wonder how much longer this happy state of affairs will last, given that Youtube is going to become GooTube (GTube? Yougle? Youtoogle?) - but tubing a random TV episode is a much less problematic act than attempting to torrent it. Yes, by gawd, it was good. And I’m not referring to the guilty pleasure of watching an episode months before it reaches the UK. In case you didn’t realize, this is one of a handful of instances where I’ve actually bothered to watch an episode of anything before it was screened on terrestrial TV; hence the novelty and my wide-eyed wonder.
Now, I just need to find some time to write required documents; work on the sadly neglected Ach a bit and a few other random odds and ends and my work life balance will be in harmony once again. At least till my supervisor comes calling *grin*
Update: Who needs an extension? browser.tabs.closeButtons rids me of those troublesome close buttons. Sanity prevails.
On 11-Oct-06 at 7:06 am,
sage wrote:
i think the built-in session saver only works for crash recovery… it doesn’t pick up the browser where you left it. i still need the session manager add-on.
and i dunno, i dunno. all the shinyness makes me feel like it’s uncomfortably heavy.
oh, and the spell checker works. heh. no more spelling errors in comments, unless they’re intentional.
On 11-Oct-06 at 9:00 am,
drac wrote:
Err. Tools -> Options -> When Firefox Starts Up -> select “Show my windows and tabs from last time”
Seemed to work for me. RC2 hasn’t crashed yet and I got all my tabs restored when I started up after installing extensions… not running any sort of session saver plugin.
I agree about the shinyness though - it’s more metallic, sorta like an old skool OSX. Still, it feels faster.
I turned the spell chucker off
On 11-Oct-06 at 9:35 am,
sage wrote:
oh nice. i didn’t see that option, all hidden in there. you’re such an option junkie.
the friggin’ thing has already crashed like FIVE friggin’ times!!!!11 and i only have like 7 or so tabs open at any given times. it must be those dodgy sites.
it seems a tad slower on startup though when using the built-in session saver.
On 11-Oct-06 at 9:40 am,
sage wrote:
AND IT DON’T GREASE MAH MONKAY!
On 11-Oct-06 at 10:13 am,
drac wrote:
Yes, yes, I am an options junkie. I’m now looking for other new-to-2.0 values in the config
Er. Assuming you meant what I think you meant - you may need GM 0.6.6 (it should be in CVS if it hasn’t been released yet). GM is one of those picky beasties which need a proper profile and a proper set of config values and so on to work. I’m not unhappy that I haven’t installed it, actually.
If you meant something else, Firefox probably doesn’t do that in version 2.0. You may need to wait for someone to build you a special community edition
Use the QF agent to report the sites it’s crashing on, please. Bugzilla is littered with reports like this, so it’s not just you. Although, I wonder. Gecko didn’t get a major update so it can’t be the renderer. Can it?
On 11-Oct-06 at 10:32 am,
Tz. wrote:
I’m getting old and sluggish. I can’t bring myself to upgrade to a RC. Imagine that. I’m looking at this thread with old-man horror at all this allegated “shininess”. My 1.5.0.7 is beautiful and worky and I want it to stay that way.
This is what dying must be like.
On 11-Oct-06 at 11:03 am,
drac wrote:
Tz: Risk free Firefox 2.0 RC. Of course, using this with a new profile is a good precaution. No installation, no upgrade.
However, I don’t think you can run both 1.5.0.7 and 2.0 RC2 at the same time. Oh, and you need Windows for this.
Or you could live vicariously through us!
It’s all good.
On 11-Oct-06 at 11:46 am,
sage wrote:
i doubt it. i don’t even remember the sites now.
ah, yes, GM 0.6.6 is what i need, it hadn’t been released yet. unfortunately, i need GM, for y’know… when Ach’s feeds get br0ked feeds, wink wink.
if a community edition of FF could do that, it’d be very very scary.
Tz, yer not old yer scurvy dawg… just lazy.
On 11-Oct-06 at 2:33 pm,
Tz. wrote:
I’ll go with the living-vicariously thing. Installing sinhala-gnu-linux was pretty much the height of geekish adventurousness my old bones can take these days.
I’m trying to resist the temptation to watch the Lost episode on the Toob. I’m positive I’ve got a torrent downloading someplace… now where was it? I’m on reruns of the second season right now and the Lost itch thereby being scratched, in no particular hurry to get to the third. Besides, must steel oneself against the mid-season dry patch.
On 12-Oct-06 at 10:41 am,
sage wrote:
woo. mid-season dry patch. you are teh Wise.
On 12-Oct-06 at 3:08 pm,
drac wrote:
Aargh. I can see how people get into this sort of thing - it’s so seductive. Episode 2 screened yesterday and I’m already hitting up Teh Gootube for my fix.
I am truly lost.
(nobody seems to have posted it up yet, gah)