The Lair

No, really. I don’t. Someone said in IRC last night: “I don’t have time to type these words to you now”. Except he was in the channel and typing them out anyway.

Life in drac land has been littered with an assorted series of road blocks recently. First, I made the traumatic decision to turn off Tab Mix Plus this morning. I say this with all the pathos of someone forced to switch off a life support machine. I think I’m justified because my browser essentially is my life support. I spend an embarassing amount of time in front of a LCD screen these days (as I have done for years now) and a good proportion of said time is spent staring at a browser. How my browser is behaving at any point in time matters for this reason.

It’s not really a secret that Firefox can be problematic at times. My biggest bugbear in the pre 2.0 days was the ghastly memory leaks. Spend a few days using the same Firefox instance and the memory usage jumps to obscene proportions. I thought I had it narrowed down to Greasemonkey and a couple of other extensions so I didn’t install them. Unfortunately, Firefox 2.0 introduced a horrible (for me) feature of a scrolling tab bar.

A scrolling tab bar is great if you have about … say … 10 tabs open at a time. I guess. I rarely have less than 30 tabs open. Yes, really. I can probably justify three quarters of those being left open all the time. [Random tip: that many tabs and Reload Every obviate the need for a separate RSS reader]

But I digress

30 odd tabs make the scrolling tab bar malarkey seem ridiculous. I can’t even remember if I have a tab of my customized slashdot home page open and if I did, it’s probably on the wrong end of a long long scroll; so I open another tab on this end. And so on and so forth. When I can’t see all the tabs I have open in one glance; my lousy memory dictates opening another tab anyway. And so the number of tabs open climb, even when they don’t need to.

Tab Mix Plus has a killer feature of being able to show all open tabs in multiple rows. None of this scrolling business. Wonderful. Never mind all the other nifty bonus features; that multi-row tab bar was what I really wanted. And then Tab Mix Plus (it seems like) started leaking memory on me.

Update: No, it’s not TMP but Firebug causing the memory leak nastiness and instability. W00t! I can live with a selective enabling of Firebug when I want it, living without TMP is enough to drive me to Opera. And yes, Firebug is still a beta so I should have checked that first.

Add to that a date mixup between the campus authorities and the department authorities (which I had to try sorting out), an impending supervisor meeting where I needed to mug up on several papers (but haven’t yet), random frustrations with the slow (glacial) pace of writing up and you can probably understand why I want this week to go off into a corner and die a quiet death. None of this kicking and screaming, don’t go all drama queen on me; just go away already.

And yet, the cotton wool escapism of a weekend of sports TV (Masters Snooker, Aussie Open and ODIs); not to mention the kickoff episode of American Idol await.

Strange, Firefox 2 released last week and I updated my primary workstation. I explicitly performed the upgrades from release candidate onwards and experimented with things. I liked it, overall. My notebook, on the other hand, was kept for an automatic upgrade notification. Only, it never happened.

I checked for updates via the Firefox menu item, infact I check on a daily basis. My notebook Firefox install is still a piddling 1.5.0.7 Only, I am informed that there are no available updates for Firefox. Ugh. So, I downloaded it myself and installed it over the old version. You’re not supposed to do that. But never mind, I did it anyway.

Discovered a few interesting extensions (mostly oldies but goodies) recently. Regular readers to the blog probably know of my ken for Greasemonkey; a means of transforming web pages using JavaScript. I had held off installing Greasemonkey because I wanted to take it slow with new extensions… Greasemonkey has been known to leak memory from time to time and I didn’t want the shiny new Firefox 2.0 to become a bloated memory hungry balloon too soon. So, in the hunt for potential alternatives, I discovered Stylish, yet another transformation extension which has been getting a lot of decent press recently.

Stylish is not exactly the same as Greasemonkey, of course. Their own comparison notes the differences - it’s more complementary than replacement. However it can actually modify the actual Firefox application look and feel - something that the JavaScript based GM can’t do. I can see uses for fiddling with user look and feel, if only to smooth over some minor Firefox UI niggles. Beats hacking around with ChromEdit anyday. Installed it and I like it thus far. I miss the power of a real programming language (yes, JavaScript is a very nice programming language. Bite me) and using styles don’t really compensate… This will, however, do nicely in a pinch.

Speaking of Greasemonkey, I’m wondering if I need to update a script I did some time ago to account for the new changes to theme and so on. I rarely use the GM script these days because I rarely visit the site; but prod me into revamping it if you feel the need.

A couple of interesting Firefox extensions that I’m contemplating using as well - a fresh look at Performancing and an alternative, Deepest Sender. Still; easy does it. I need to figure out the bad extensions and make sure the memory leaks don’t recur. Seem to have Firefox 2.0 down to leaking about 10 megs a day or so; which is acceptable considering it would leak 10 times that in a day in the 1.5 era.

Also got me a mess of RATM and Primal Scream from elric. Woo.