Recently in Firefox Category

When I was playing around with Firefox 3 several months ago one of the biggest annoyances for me was the "autocomplete".

As you type a URL Firefox suggests links from your browser history.

While that might be useful the way they've implemented it is incredibly obtrusive and, therefore, really really annoying.

As I mentioned previously I couldn't upgrade to Firefox 3 as my main browser for a number of silly reasons. Since then those issues have been resolved, so I've started using FF3 on my home desktop.

So what about the annoying auto-complete?

Well it's easy enough to disable if you know how.

Luckily somebody out there did!

Like so many Firefox settings it can be configured via the advanced configuration menu, which now comes with a health warning!

In your location (address) bar simply type "about:config" (no quotes).
The variable / setting you need to change is found under:

I've set mine to "1", as I really don't need more. I can always change it later if I really want to.

Restart Firefox and finally sanity is restored!

Although I only upgraded my Mac's browser to Firefox 3 this morning I will be downgrading it shortly

Why?

Practicalities.

Several web applications I use on a regular basis break badly in Firefox 3, which renders them unusable (typo3) or not as usable as I would like (Movable Type).

I know the guys in Movable Type will fix the issues, though they were waiting on a stable Firefox release before they made any crazy changes.

I've no idea how long it will be before the Typo3 team fix the UI issues on their end.

Unfortunately in both cases the issues arise from Javascript rendering issues ie. the browser engine has changed how it handles it

Ah well!

Today sees the official release of Firefox 3

Ubuntu users seem to have been granted the privilege of downloading the new release since this morning for some odd reason!

The guys behind Firefox are also trying for a Guinness record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period.

Inevitably their web servers have crashed under the load and are now displaying an error message:


I guess that was to be expected, however their FTP servers are still working fine!

If you want to grab the new version of Firefox via FTP you can get it here

I enjoy playing around with new "toys", so I was delighted to get an email earlier this evening from one of the Zemanta team earlier this evening to let me know that they'd added support for Movable Type.

The concept behind Zemanta is intriguing. It's a browser plugin that integrates with serveral of the more popular blogging platforms via your browser. Once you've composed a blog post of 300 characters or more it will make suggestions for images, links and other content.

As they describe it themselves:
The images are pulled from a variety of sources, but they assure users that they are all copyright cleared ie. you won't be getting any nastygrams from people's legal teams asking you to remove them!

Although the people at Zemanta only officially support Firefox I'm working away quite happily using the plugin on Swiftweasel, which is a derivative.

A new look and feel was unveiled for Dilbert.com

You'd think that people would be delighted, but the opposite is the case.

Why?

Well whoever is responsible for the screwup that is the new site seems to be living in the past.

The new Flash animations are simple Flash. There's no reason why they wouldn't work in most browsers on most platforms, but if you visit the animation section using Linux you get a lovely message:
So you grab yourself a copy of the UserAgent Switcher extension for Firefox and "spoof" a "supported" browser. And of course the entire thing then works fine.

Doh!

I downloaded a copy of Firefox 3 (beta) for linux earlier this evening to see how it was. I've been having very annoying issues with Firefox 2 on Ubuntu locking up randomly, so I was hoping to see if the new version would help.

Unfortunately there isn't an official Ubuntu release as yet, but you can easily use the standard download for linux.

I'm trying desperately to be impressed and find something to "wow" about, but so far it's left me completely underwhelmed.

If anything its "enhancements" are simply annoying.

They're mostly aesthetic and may simply be a case of them being different to what I'm used to.

As you start typing in an address into the toolbar it tries to "suggest" addresses from your "history" but in so doing it takes up loads of screen estate and invariably gets it wrong.

Of course it's a beta release, so you'd have to be really dumb to expect it to work properly! Beta software is meant to have bugs. Ideally they should be squashed before the software is made available to the general public.

Whether I'll keep playing around with this version or revert to the older one is something I'm not 100% sure about just yet.. We'll see

AIB finally upgraded our company account to use their new system which supports "real" Java and my choice of browser (Firefox).
It seems they have been migrating companies across to the new system over the last few months.
We now all have a little calculator sized "doda" called a "digipass" which basically generates a lot of random numbers.

Downsides
Upsides
AIB's business banking was one of the few reasons I kept Windows XP installed on my office PC at all. The only thing stopping me from switching over now is finding the time to actually do it ie. migrate data from local hard drives (if there is any) and import mail from Outlook into Thunderbird (that's going to hurt!)