Peter's Blog - Nodes for firefox

IE7 is crap

I had a complaint from a loyal reader about this site not rendering properly on IE. It got half way through my article on Ruby Metaclasses and stopped.

The problem was caused by my using the term <object> in my text and the wilki filter not changing the < and > into html entities. IE treated <object> as a keyword and tried to download a trojan or whatever it does in those circumstances. Presumably firefox saw that the semantics were totally wrong (for example, no attributes to direct it to a specific object) and ignored it.

Since I use firefox and I don't proof read ever article in every available browser this one slipped through.

Apologies for interruption of service.

And thanks again Dean for your concern.

On Safari

I was studying my access logs and noticed visitors using the Safari web browser under Windows. I thought, "No, can't be right, maybe Safari is lying to the server about the OS to get around compatibility problems" since Safari is an Apple OS/X browser.

I was at the Apple site for something or other and discovered it is true: there is a version of Safari for Windows here. It's a beta but everything is beta these days.

I've been using it at home and I'm liking it. It has the features of Firefox that I actually use but it feels leaner and meaner. There is something about the way it presents web pages that makes them look nicer. Don't ask me what, it's a subtle Apple designer thing that an engineering brain cannot put a finger on: if mine could I would be outta here and busy growing a ponytail.

One thing about Apple design I must address: the brushed metal look gets old very quickly, I'm already tired of it from iTunes I don't see any way to change the 'theme' and Windowblinds cannot change it (did I mention that rather than buy Windows Vista I just bought Windowblinds?).

It has crashed on me once, the text box I am typing this in has tiny weeny text and is making me squint (my glasses are two flights of stairs down ) I have found one or two sites with problems but I'm still using it. Oh, and it seems to insist on installing Quicktime when you install it which is a minus to me.

Firefox is seeming more and more bloated these days and takes about thirty seconds to boot on my crappy work computer. Opera is ok but whenever I try it I drift back to Firefox. Safari is quite likely to go the same way but it's a new toy for a few days. Internet Explorer, well HA I only use it on sites that don't work with anything else.

I so want an iPhone.

Related Posts: firefox safari windowblinds

App Data

Trying to get firefox to link to files on the intranet I came across a couple of useful tips:

You can find a users personal application directory under documents and settings by opening '%AppData%' in the run menu.
If you have to create a user.js file remember that if you do it with notepad in stupid hide registered file extensions mode you will actually get a file called user.js.txt and it will take you another 20 minutes to figure out why it doesn't make any difference.

Opera

I'm back on the new beta of Opera version 9. It seems a bit more stable than the alpha version I tried before. It is generally compatible with most sites I have visited, only having problems with some Microsoft sites so far, not a big surprise.

Opera is a nice piece of software, it 'feels' less bloaty than firefox and yet has more features built in (Gestures, email) that don't come with vanilla firefox and you don't have to mess with extensions.

Opera

I'm trying the Opera 9 preview as an alternative (or complement) to Firefox. Opera has been attractive to me in the past but always gave odd rendering problems or crashes that put me off. This version has been ok thus far and has features built in that are quite seductive. Ok firefox has extensions but these all seem to break every time they upgrade it and I have got fed up with reinstalling them (too high maintenance).

Opera goodies, some maybe all available as Firefox extensions but are bundled with opera:

Fast Forward: this button seems to find the 'next' link on your page and clicks it for you. You can go through google results very quickly.
gestures: right click and move the cursor around to control the browser: e.g. right click and move right does the fast forward action so takes you to the next page with no fuss and minimal physical effort.
email client: this supports IMAP and works with Microsoft Exchange. It chucks all email in one folder and gives lots of options for searching through it. For example, you click on a contact name and see all the mail from that contact. Looks ok so far and is appealing as the memory footprint of Opera should be less than Firefox + Thunderbird. Only downside so far: cannot compose html email. Not a showstopper as I rarely bother to format email (like I rarely bother to format blog postings) and it does display html email (as a web browser should be able to).
It supports widgets if you have a need for a huge clock that cannot be resized. There are only 9 of them so far (clock, calculator, calendar etc).

Possibly more cool: Opera Mini. This is a version of Opera written in Java so it works on my Sony-Ericsson K750i phone. This is a proper web browser, it supports http/html, it is not a crippled WAP thing so you can look at real web sites. It displays them in a tiny font that gets a lot of info on the screen. It communicates with a server at Opera which compresses the pages you are viewing and minimises the download: the front page of this site was a 8k! I installed it thusly:

Download the .jar and .jad files for the k750i.
Connect phone to USB
Copy files to \MSSEMC\Media files\other
Unplug phone (stopping USB devices on Windows 2000, not necessary on XP).
On phone, go to 'My Items', Other.
Select the .jar file, right click and Install. It will ask you if you want it installed as an Application or Game: you decide.
For uk vodafone, go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Internet Profiles and create a new profile. Give it any name and set the 'Connect Using' field to 'Contract Internet'.
Go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Settings for Java(tm) and select here the new profile you created above.
Go to My Items/Applications (or Games) and select Opera Mini. It will do a connectivity test. If it fails the internet profile for java above might be wrong.
Enjoy

Related Posts: exchange firefox imap opera thunderbird

Firefox 1.5 and local files

Firefox 1.5 is out and has broken the check checkloadurl option that I previously used to access local files. By default firefox will not let you open local files defined by the file:// protocol in the url.

This page proposes a fiddly solution involving editig user.js files but the following also appears to work:

go to about:config
find the term network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris and edit it
enter the address of your intranet site, e.g. http:://intranet.bigco.com (this threw me for a bit, I though you had to put the file:// link in here but it's the originating web site that you are trusting).

Credit to whoever mentioned this method in the comments to Firefox intranet problem.

UPDATE: this may only work if you log into the windows domain, otherwise you have to use the fiddly solution (editing files, no gui ).

To summarise the fiddly solution, edit/create a user.js file in your firefox profile directory and put this in it:

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://intranet.bigco.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

where intranet.bigco.com is the url of your intranet.

If you don't know where your firefox profile directory is then look here.

Web Browser Memory Abusage

My work pc (450MHz, 256M ram, Win XP) is very slow, particularly when Firefox is running. Firefox uses about 30M of ram and if I minimise it and use other applications, when I go back to it I have to wait about a minute for it to swap back from disk. If, when it does show itself, I start typing in the google search bar it takes about five seconds to show each letter.

I gave Opera a try in the hope that it would be better. When I have tried it in the past it had had problems redering some sites, more so than firefox but I can always live with that. However this time the javascript on gmail made it crash. No solution. While it was running it was also using 30M ram. It is as if these webbrowsers just create a huge bitmap of the website in memory and display that.

Don't mention IE. I'm looking for something lean, not just mean.

I have another PC I am using (1.7G, 512 ram, Win2K) and it flies. Even while compiling a huge Visual C++ project (1000 source files) and with firefox loaded it has over 200M of ram still free.

I think I'd much rather use a fast PC running Win2k than a slow PC running XP. It would help if I could think of just one feature of XP that I miss.

Moral: ask your boss for a faster PC.

I hate pdf files

I hate pdf files. Or maybe just Acrobat Reader.

Reason 1: acrobat reader has made firefox lock up for me for a while, such that I have disabled the .pdf plugin so that pdf's simply get downloaded. This morning I am playing with my new MSN Search toolbar install (or whatever the name is this week) and it locks up trying to show me a pdf file. (Sidetrack: I indexed some of the company file server: could be interesting).

Reason 2: why can't I set a default resolution that is reasonable? Each and every new document opens in some random way the 'author' left the settings at and I have to fiddle around trying make it readable. Do I have this trouble with html pages? No. Web Browsers are designed to display pages in the most readable way, Acrobat Reader is designed to make the pages appear how the 'author' intended them.

Reason 3: someone sent me a requirement spec containing an extract from a comms protocol I had to implement. I try to copy the extract and paste it straight into my test harness and what do I get? Garbage. It seems that pfd files can use weird fonts and character encodings internally and it makes no attempt to fix itself if you copy and paste. I tried using various ubuntu tools to get the text and same problem, it's the pdf format that is broken here. There are three solutions:

get the 'author' to use standard fonts. Some hope.
print it and read it back using OCR.
retype it yourself. Be sure to charge time taken to client.

Welcome to the age of electronic documentation.

Reason 4: Acrobat reader 7 is out but I don't want to install it because of Adobes policy of accepting $$$ from anyone in return for dumping their stuff on my computer. Yahoo toolbar? I can download it myself. PrintMe? Bite me.

Reason 5: What usability expert decided that clicking on a page should change the resolution? Just when you have it set right?

Conclusion: I hate pdf files. And Acrobat Reader.

Update: Foxit Reader free, small fast pdf viewer.

Rounded boxes for FireFoxes

Firefox has a tags/css extension that supports borders with rounded corners:

-moz-border-radius : 10px;

For example, this should have rounded corners in Firefox but boring square corners in boring Internet Explorer

I'll be mildly curious to see how much of this is stripped out by bloglines. UPDATE: the whole thing. The last paragraph should have been in a rounded box.

Sharp eyed visitors to my blog may spot this in my theme.

Books

I'm a big fan of O'Reilly books. This weekend I bought Firefox Hacks, 100 tips for using firefox. Really interesting book, the tip about using it to view Mysql databases was the seller for me. An example hack:

open about:config
double click on browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs
open options/advanced
there is now a new option to force all web pages to open in new tabs of the current browser window instead of new windows.

I have seen extensions to do this but extensions are hastle, I'd rather use built in features.

Anyway, on the back of the book was a mention for Safari online bookshelf and I wondered what this could be. It turns out to be something incredible. For as little as about £5 a month you can choose from 3383 books by O'Reilly, Que and others to read online. You choose a book and have access to it for 30 days, after which you can swap it for another book. Depending on the virtual value of each book for £5 a month you could have five books open. The seems to be all the O'Reilly books I can dream of: Mysql cookbooks, python cookbooks, bash reference, you name it.

I think this is a good deal, I like O'Reilly books but I am reluctant to fork out £17 or so a pop. I'm pretty well tempted.