Giving away estates — the Firefox conundrum

No not those bits of land everyone loves to squabble and fight over which in time will be either at the bottom of a sea, or pitching and yawing broiling in the mantle, or perched atop a mountain top with some new species, all ready to conquer!

No, I’m talking about the recently released FF4.  A new Firefox which certainly loads faster than FF3, not as fast as Chrome – with the same number of extensions in both, but the release puts it firmly back into pleasurable browser usage territory, instead of turning into an IE6 look-alike; simply down to usage perceptions.  So kudos to the hard work put into this release, by all of those involved. 

I find (and counting myself in here), that many Firefox users load in add-ons as though legislation is being hurriedly enacted banning them from ever using their favourite crutch again.  The poor browsers are so encumbered with add-ons, they creak and groan under the combined weight of anything from the latest top 10, to looking up the defining quote for beibergit (definition of which is still awaiting entry).  Those older stalwart users remember the days of memory hogging - where the program grabbed as much memory as it could handle until your pc fell over – making the entire experience slower than watching paint dry, twice!

Naturally, over the years, this has inevitably led to Chrome becoming the default due to its unmatched speed; but even here, the inclusion of many extensions has reduced this once proud road runner to a slightly speedy wile e coyote.

I have being using Firefox since its inception and wanted to return to those halcyon days of tear-jerk quality every techno-nerd finds a need to return to.  This latest incarnation (including the table mats) once again makes Firefox a viable browser of choice. 

So, in pictures…

Ah yes, so where does giving away estates come into things, I hear the pondering?

If you look compare and look closely at the top bars of Chrome and Firefox, you’ll notice Firefox has a 3mm extra drop – if you look closely.  Don’t knock it, perception of size matters.  For those who don’t give a fig, give it a whirl and definitely try the table mats Ctrl + Shft + E in the browser, it’ll open up a whole new world of browsing possibilities.

Firefox 4, browsing to the future

BloatedFox

Firefox – pile of crap!

Was my final assessment after all the extensions I had installed meant my one and only Firefox profile, ate up 1GB of memory.  Took over 2 minutes to load.  And rattled along like a paddle steamer in the middle of a drought.  But it had all my passwords, bookmarks, automatic this, auto that, and – once it loaded, settled down, browsing however slovenly was somewhat a joy.

But it was time for radical treatment, to prune this overwhelming bush back to something more manageable.  As used to occur with XP once to many applications were in/uninstalled, caused it to run like a brick pulling a tractor, the only cure was a format and clean operating system re-install.

So down I dug and created two additional profiles, two bare bone profiles. 

But even with the extension list pared to the bone, there are simply some things I can’t live without: i.e., noscript, finjan and mouse gestures.  Simply typed those into the add-on search section of mozillas’ website downloaded and installed.

A quick restart later, everything in the browser was looking a bit sparse (I had forgotten how boringly dull the default theme looked), so decided to install adblock. 

Final browser restart, visited my usual sites and considering the time and connections, I was once more impressed with how speedy it (Firefox 3.0.10) actually is when it’s not a bloated loaded down monster.  Admittedly it’s still slower to start up than Chrome 3 or Opera 10, but it’s faster than IE 8 and Safari – on my system. 

With Firefox’s faster engine and other associated tweaked bits in 3.5 soon to bolt from the stable, my three suitably primed profiles armed, it looks as if my love-in with FF is back on, in the love fest that calls itself the interweb!

Opera 10

Browsers and their updates seem to be falling out of development cycles at a heady rate over the latter end of the year.

And the latest is an alpha version of Opera 10, available from http://www.opera.com/browser/next/, all the while remembering that alpha releases might be unstable and should only be used as an indication of the final release.

But Opera was one of the first to incorporate mouse gestures, one of the fastest (after the new pack rendering leader - Chrome), a delight to use, small footprint, and the browser of choice for when I decide to blow off the dust and gain access to my cobwebbed account.

So the blurb...

"This release gives people a taste of Opera’s new rendering engine, Opera Presto 2.2 — the foundation of all future Opera 10 products. Opera Presto 2.2 offers approximately a 30-percent-faster browsing experience as compared to Opera Presto 2.1, introduced in Opera 9.5 in June 2008.

Opera has fine-tuned its standards support and, as a result, Opera 10 alpha achieves an Acid3 100/100 Test score. This version also provides Web developers with a whole range of new technologies for building better Web sites.

Other new features in Opera 10 alpha include spell-checking as you type, as well as auto-updating to the latest versions as they become available. Opera Mail also has added support for HTML formatting of e-mails."

Good to see that companies like opera can still exist and come up with innovative and free software. 

If you don't, just yet, wish to risk your set up then stick with Opera 9.6.  If however your sense of adventures is piqued.  Take the plunge, download the Opera 10 (alpha) and run.

Firefox 3.0.4 update tweak

Not quite sure whether it's me or the code on the pages i usually visit have been cleaned up, or the guys & gals beavering away behind the scenes on ff3 have at last sorted out the memory issues.

But, for the first time in ages ff no longer claws its way through all the available memory, until it either falls over or slows everything else down.. 

Up until today, it had reached the stage where the the browser would after a short period of time need  restart. Once response times became sluggish and ff easily chomping its way to nearly 1GB nothing else would work except a restart. 

It's been open for nearly half an hour with my usual windows tabs open and it's hovering contentedly around the 70MB mark.

So far, a hearty thumbs up!

First play of chrome

The hours tick by as many people await the browser everyone is talking about. Google with another launch, wonder if it will have browser-beta somewhere? This is beginning to look like apple fanmania.

Reminds me of the hoop-la when gtalk arrived. Haven't seen any major im's falling by the wayside just yet.  The fact their non-related sibling (mozilla) wasn't told... well let's just see what happens, in just under three years time.

Currently using ff3 quite happily.  Followed by safari/opera then ie8 - just to test website compatibility - and viewable by the majority of browsers in use. Out there in the internet viewing world.

Its here!

And first looks are, not sure I like the colour. But that'll change. Tabs? Can go with those, on a 24" lcd it's quite spacious - looks less crammed.

And not a beta tag to be seen! Now this is different, time to tinker...

Easy installation, hasn't crashed yet... more play

For those who haven't tried it yet, it can be downloaded from here.