It’s nice when software reflects a programmer’s sense of humour and humility. This message appeared when I restarted Firefox 3.5.3 after an XP crash:
Bravo – thanks for making me chuckle, and thus forgive you instantly for any error (and it might not even have been yours). Bless.
I’ve been running Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8 on this machine for a little while now. Both are worthy upgrades to their line, addressing their previous shortcomings quite nicely – Firefox is now faster and more importantly leaner on memory use, and Internet Explorer seems to have mostly shaken off the dull, bare bones feel that it’s had in the past, and is definitely faster and more standards compliant.
I actually feel I could use any of Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome or Opera now and be fairly happy. I’m sticking with Firefox, because the addons I use still keep it ahead of the alternatives as a user experience for me – the reason that I find it better is, I think, that a vibrant community inherently produces enough breadth that I can always find things which make a substantive improvement to the way I personally want to use the browser. No matter how many snazzy features a single team decides to put in a browser, they’re never going to hit the mark with everyone, and I find that only a small percentage of the in-the-box feature points of IE8, Safari or Chrome are of any real interest to me. That’s why just a speed bump and memory optimisation was all I really needed from Firefox 3.5; I make my own recipe of must-have features from the community instead.
But still, the days of ‘browser X sucks compared to browser Y’ seem to be mostly over for the moment, as competition has levelled the playing field to the extent that it’s mostly personal preference on the small things that remain. That’s a huge improvement from Microsoft particularly, who deserved their reputation for producing terrible browsers in the past, but who I think have now earned the right to shake off that reputation. As much as it’s a difficult adjustment to make, IE is no longer a bad browser. It’s just another decent browser that is missing my Firefox addons 
Oh, this is so ripe for satire I really can’t believe Microsoft didn’t see it coming. Or, perhaps they did and just ran with it anyway, for funsies. It appears Microsoft’s Australian website is encouraging people to switch to IE8 by offering an online treasure hunt, where a series of clues will lead you to a site identifying the location of the $10k (AU$ presumably), which can only be viewed with IE8. They gleefully point out:
“But you’ll never find it with old Firefox. So get rid of it, or get lost.”
So, let’s stack up the issues here:
A Mozilla dev has already fired back a response, but really I don’t think it needed one. I think the fact that this promotion exists at all, and the tone which it takes, speaks volumes about how much the browser landscape has changed in recent years.
I noticed that in the last few days, Firefox started crashing a lot, and it seemed to be related to viewing YouTube in a tab – something I’ve done regularly for a long time. It started to annoy me, so I looked into it, and it turns out that there’s some issue with some Flash ads YouTube started running recently.
So, if you get YouTube crashing when you close or open a YouTube tab, just add this filter to AdBlock:
http://*.ytimg.com/yt/swf/PMS*
Hey presto, no more crashes. There’s a discussion going on in this thread about longer term fixes but this does it for me for now.
I generally opt not to block ads on websites by default, because I derive some of the funds required to host the Ogre website from ads and therefore it would be hypocritical for me to universally opt-out. However, I do draw the line sometimes when website admins start taking the piss. Eurogamer in particular has been running some incredibly irritating ads lately, consisting of massive surrounds with multiple video feeds and all kinds of other bollocks that make the site limp like a wounded badger, especially if I’m taxing my machine running a build in the background (which I normally am – that’s when I tend to check news sites). So for them I’ve specifically blocked their silly uber-media ads until they get a bit more sensible about it.
Now it’s out of beta, Firefox 3 has become my primary browser – it’s a nice speed upgrade and I like the little extras like the unobtrusive ‘remember password’ prompt, smart location bar and reduced memory usage. It’s a shame their servers went belly-up on the planned release day, but then they did paint a bullseye on their face.
There were a few hiccups- I have a few add-ons I generally feel I couldn’t live without and a couple of them didn’t want to work immediately.
Also oddly, I had no back / forward button block to begin with. I don’t know if that was linked to the fact that I’d been running the beta beforehand, but I had to customise the toolbar to add it back in.
Still, overall it definitely feels faster and slicker, so it’s a useful update to a major staple of my application toolset. I haven’t tried the native look and feel on OS X yet, I’ll be updating next time I’m on the Mac to see what it’s like.
Opera is still the fastest browser of course, but IMO they really missed the boat by holding on to the concept of being able to sell a browser for a little too long, and I’m not sure they’ll ever catch up in terms of the sheer breadth of available add-ons. I have Opera installed on my machine too (for testing) and although it’s good I always gravitate back to FF just because of all the useful add-ons & the more active community – the same applied to Safari on the Mac.
Whatever your preference, with all these options there’s really no excuse to still be using that buggy piece of trash called IE!
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