Monday, June 16, 2008

A bizarre, slightly addictive video

I keep watching this, and I really couldn't tell you why.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

A Day of Mourning

Firefox is planning a world wide Download Day June 17, trying to set a Guinness World Record for downloads in 24 hours.

I have used Firefox V3 off and on in various beta's and Release Candidates for some time. Unless things change dramatically, I intend to stay with Firefox 2.0.0.14 as long as I can, and then likely will go to Opera or even Internet Explorer.

Firefox V.3 is faster, and perhaps more secure than version 2.x. But the user interface is somewhere between annoying and appalling. Indeed, there are so many hiccups I assumed the problems were bugs the developers had not yet gotten around to fixing. Then I tried the first Release Candidate, and realized things I thought were glitches were in fact deliberate 'features'.


Some of the more memorable changes I've encountered:
  • Do you keep a list of bookmarks in the Bookmark menu bar pulldown? Under V.3, you no longer have a list of links you can scroll through. You'll have a menu entry labeled 'Bookmarks', under Bookmarks. Hit that, you'll get a page with your ENTIRE bookmark file, expanded, with any comments you or the site supplied. (A hint: Use Find to search for a word or two out of the link. Much easier than scrolling through what is likely several hundred links.)
  • Did you use the History in the sidebar? I finally found it, under View. Why they moved it someone else will have to explain.
  • The bookmarks can be displayed in the sidebar as well. If you don't mind having the entire file displayed, fully expanded, with comments. Try it. Who knows, you might like it.
  • The Organize Bookmarks entry is still around, but it displays all your history, any recent bookmarks you've used, and does not display the contents of your bookmark file. The point of that is not as yet clear to me.
I really hope some of these things can be changed by the user, but so far I haven't found any way to do that.