Orca Browser first impressions.

Could be the best new browser since Firefox 1.0.
by AC - permalink

First things first: Orca 1.0 RC3 is incredibly stable for what it is - Avant Browser's UI grafted onto the Gecko engine. That's especially impressive considering this is basically being coded by one guy, and testing has been limited to a single forum thread. A few other notes and thoughts:

Big chunks of code seem to have been lifted directly from Avant Browser, including the bookmarks system. Orca imports Internet Explorer favorites and Links (analogous to Firefox's Bookmarks toolbar items), and uses AB's manager. Which means it can't import bookmarks from Fx, Opera, or anything else except IE. Big problem there.

With minor tweaks, the preferences interface is identical to AB's as well. Hopefully this will be overhauled in the future, as the prefwindow has always been one of Avant's weakest points. It's cluttered and haphazardly organized.

Orca uses AB's kickass little customizable tab controls toolbar. It's one of my all-time favorite browser UI elements, but it still can't be placed on the tab bar itself.

The integrated RSS viewer is solid. Much better than Opera's mail-based reader, but not yet as good as the Sage extension for Firefox.

Built-in adblocking is iffy. There's a solid wildcarded blacklist in place, but AB's context-menu option for adding an image/address to the blacklist is missing. Not a deal-killer, but irritating.

The various toolbars can be rearranged and resized as easily as IE's, but they tend to be jumpy and don't always hold position when the window is maximized/restored. Still a lot more stable than Maxthon, but not as solid as Firefox in that respect. At this early stage in Orca's development, it's the price paid for all that layout flexibility.

Orca is a cool name. And the artwork is nice - but not as good as SeaMonkey's. You can't fight the awesome power of the brine shrimp, Anderson. I'm sorry, but it just can't be done. Hopefully that reads somewhat ironic.

Orca Browser 1.0 RC3

Where the hell did this come from?
by AC - permalink

I stumbled onto something surprising this morning. Apparently Anderson Che - the Avant Browser guy - has been working on a new web browser called Orca Browser for nearly a year now. He actually announced this and started open testing in September, but somehow I just never heard about it. In any case, unlike Avant, which is an IE shell, Orca is based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine (like K-Meleon, Netscape, SeaMonkey, etc.). The first Orca alpha seems to have been based on the Firefox 1.0.x branch. I'm not sure yet about this morning's release, 1.0 release candidate 3.

First impression: Orca is virtually indistinguishable from Avant, at least from a UI and design perspective. In fact, it seems to refer to itself as Avant Browser way too often for this to be a release candidate. The installer itself is on the bloated side at 6409K, but new Gecko releases are always pretty huge before the code is pared down. I'll play around with Orca Browser some more and tell you how I think it stacks up against Firefox, Opera, and of course Avant.

Bored out of my skull.

I hate this computer so much.
by AC - permalink

Is it wrong to want to physically harm an innocent, awful computer? I mean, I really want to. I don't know who was working here over the weekend or what they did to this PC, but it's doing weird shit I've never seen before. Mouse input is stuttering and halting, then goes out entirely, right after boot. I reinstalled the drivers and it did nothing. I finally found a workaround by not touching it until Windows was completely loaded and all the background apps finished whatever the hell they do on boot, then freeing up as much memory as possible, then slowly moving the cursor around a little. I also can't touch it while anything significant is loading into or out of virtual memory.

While this works, it's also clearly completely insane. Shouldn't I be able to do simple things like, I dunno, close a dialog without immediately losing all mouse input? What the hell is wrong with this thing?

Anyway. I got my own copy of Aqua Teen Hunger Force season four yesterday. It's funny. You should go buy it. The extended, uninterrupted Spacecataz episode and the satiric, bizarre mini-movie about the dangers of Radon are probably worth the $25 alone. And they should be, because the numerous commentaries are pretty worthless.

There is just nothing going on in this hotel tonight. I've got about ten more rooms sold than usual, but apparently everyone's just asleep for once. I'll probably make this post a little more worth anybody's time after I get home this morning.

Xbox 360 vs. a new PC.

It's all about the input.
by AC - permalink

I knocked three names off my Xmas shopping list with a trip to Walmart this morning. I got season four of Aqua Teen Hunger Force for one of my cousins, and he better fucking like it because it's taking all of my willpower not to tear off the shrink-wrap and rip it to a hard drive before wrapping it up. While I was wandering around the electronics niche I watched some dude play the Xbox 360 version of Call of Duty 2 on a little hi-def TV, and I have to admit it's really goddamn impressive looking. He was in the north African campaign, riding in the back of a truck and then mopping up the infantry around a burning artillery emplacement. Stunningly silky framerate aside, the smoke effects absolutely blew me away. I've never seen anything like that before. At one point, he charged a sandbag bunker a little too recklessly, and after he mowed down the three defending Germans, one of them suddenly reared back up and took aim at point-blank range, but before he could squeeze off a shot, an offscreen friendly took him out again.

It was an impressive, random sequence, but I just kept thinking about how much more fun it would be on a PC with the classic -- and more responsive -- mouse and keyboard setup. At $400 with $60 games, 360 is just too expensive. I have my eye on the eMachines T6524, a budget box loaded with so much stuff it's almost comedic. It's only $200 more than the 360, and five-star PC games have been coming out for a decade, most of which can be had now for ten to thirty bucks. So how is this a tough decision?

Later in the morning I had to drive out to the airport and back. I hate going to the Memphis airport. I've done it at least a dozen times, and I hate it every time. Even worse, I took the interstate. I went south on the eastern side of the interstate loop, which meant 20 minutes of sitting in bottleneck traffic because of a hundred-yard stretch of construction. On the way back I realized I'd overestimated the amount of gas I had and was forced to get off at a random exit (turned out to be Third St.) to refuel. Eventually I groped my way back onto the freeway and came back up north on the west-side loop, which meant sitting through a different construction-caused bottleneck. God, this city sucks sometimes.

Anyway. Dell is apparently including Firefox on the overpriced, underserviced PCs it's selling in the UK. OK, that was a little harsh. It's just that I've been pricing Dells for a long time, and the sub-thousand lot are a joke. 256MB, 40GB, and a DVD-ROM? That might have been a great deal three years ago, but come on.

Opera Mini sort of works.

But do I really need the internet on my phone?
by AC - permalink

Just for the hell of it, I downloaded Opera Mini (mini.opera.com from your cell) onto my cheap little Nokia 3120 cell phone tonight. It pre-renders web pages on a remote server, lightening the load for resource-starved phones. It actually seems to work pretty well. I was able to access a couple of pages -- complete with graphics -- that my phone's standard browser couldn't due to RAM limitations. It cut this blog's front page into four slices, for example. Unfortunately, when I decided to jump to my bookmarks, the browser crashed without any explanation. I suppose I'll play around with it a little more. The software itself is just a 60k download, and it cuts up pages into chunks smaller than that, but I think I'm paying like 1 cent per kB for data, and I don't think it's really worth paying a buck or so to read a tiny, tiny web page. Maybe for occasional email access.

Firemonger 1.5 was released tonight. It contains Firefox 1.5 but still only Thunderbird 1.0.7. Worldwide testing of Tbird 1.5 RC2 is scheduled for today, so it seems like they could have waited for Tbird 1.5 final. Anyhow, FM 1.5 also lets you run Firefox from the CD before installing it, and features single-click theme and extension installation.

It's 1am now and I need to get myself some coffee.

Email post

...On the worst PC ever.
by AC - permalink

Imagine an old Celeron-based business PC with 64MB RAM running Win 98 for three straight years without a reformat, or even a disk defrag. If you're picturing random BSOD's and constant VM swapping, you're on the right track. Also, the C key barely works. In any case, I installed Firefox 1.5 last week, and the entire staff here switched over completely without any input from me at all.

By the way, I'm mail-posting because blogger.com is one of the very few sites blocked by this network. The list of things you can't do in a post-by-mail is short, but why hyperlinks have to be auto-created out of complete URLs I don't know. So I probably won't be linking anywhere tonight.

For some reason I thought Gmail had gone public, but I guess not. I generally use Thunderbird, but I'm composing with the webmail client and I just noticed a little box telling me I have a hundred Gmail invites. But doesn't everybody already have an account by now? Anyway, if anybody wants one, post a comment with your email address.

Just tried to switch tabs and got an instant reboot instead. Lovely.

Slashdot.org and CNet mention a guy named Myk Melez who's put a tab UI into Thunderbird nightlies. It's an interesting idea that I'm sure has been kicked around at Mozilla before. If he writes a tabbed, "single-window mode" extension for Tbird 1.5 I'd like to try it, but I'm not into the bleeding edge, latest trunk stuff.

Oh, and a security flaw in Fx 1.5 was made public today. Mozilla.org generally has patches available for current Fx branches within 72 hours, but in the meantime you can protect yourself by disabling the history.dat file. No, I don't know how to do that either.

I'm officially through hearing about how the NBA's Eastern Conference has caught up to the West this season. In Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday's games, the East lost 10 of the 12 inter-conference games, and the Atlantic division is still waiting for a team to break .500. That's quality basketball. Every time you hear a talking hairdo on ESPN or TNT ranting about how far the West has fallen, keep in mind that he's only talking about the former elites and the overrated (LA Lakers, Houston, Sacramento, Seattle). The West is still strong, but it will take some time for everyone to realize that the West's top teams are now - in addition to San Antonio and Dallas - from places like Memphis, Oakland, Phoenix, and LA. No, the other LA.

Update 10:00am: Doing a little formatting at home, but I'm not touching the content. Time for bed.

SeaMonkey has a face.

Brine shrimp are neat.
by AC - permalink

The SeaMonkey logo design contest announced at the end of July has finally ended. The new logo and artwork is now official, and it looks pretty good. Now we just need a solid browser to back it up. The early SeaMonkey alpha I tested was an improvement on the Mozilla Suite it was based on, but still too bulky and too buggy. The most confusing and frustrating aspect of MozSuite for me was the fact that it was extensible, but had no extension UI. It was easy enough to install an extension, but a pain in the ass to uninstall one that no longer works with an updated build of the browser. I hope the SM developers can do something about that.

I installed Firefox 1.5 on an old Celeron-based computer at work a few days ago. Friday night I went in for a few hours and found my boss using it, and repeatedly wondering out loud how it could be so much faster than IE6. I'll let him digest it for a while before showing him how to use Adblock and Tab Mix Plus.

PCWorld.com tagged Mozilla Firefox the Product of the Year in their list of the 100 Best Products of 2005, just ahead of Gmail and Mac OS X Tiger. Thunderbird ranked 28th, behind Sony's PSP (19th) but ahead of Photoshop CS2 (32nd), iTunes (34th), and Half-Life 2 (38th). Opera 8 shows up 88th, which seems a little low to me. It falls behind Trillian at 61st and the Mac Mini (75th), which was pretty much a flop.

And on a final, selfish note, the Memphis Grizzlies, after three straight 20+ point wins, suddenly have the third-best record in the NBA, thanks to the league's best defense (86.2 ppg allowed) and what might be the best backcourt around. Only Detroit and San Antonio, last year's NBA championship finalists, have a better record after the first full month of the season. And nobody's talking about Memphis. Anywhere. This happened two years ago, when the Griz snuck up on teams all year and walked away with fifty wins and a playoff berth. Well, they aren't paying attention this season, either, and this team is better than the 2004 squad. If one or two execution/coaching issues I've noticed get cleared up, and barring significant injuries, Memphis could, potentially, have one of the league's elite teams this year. We'll see.

Firefox 1.5 is officially official.

Even better, they've finally killed UMO.
by AC - permalink

So Firefox 1.5 has been sealed up and finalized. As expected, 1.5 RC3 is 1.5 final. If you've been using a 1.5 beta, you'll get a small update patch soon. If you're still running Fx 1.0.7, you can get the new version at the new Mozilla.com via the redesigned Mozilla.org. AMO has also been totally overhauled, and is featuring the new official del.icio.us extension. It's convenient, but nowhere near as cool as the new ESPN BottomLine extension. Essentially, it's a Flash-based interactive, customizable version of the ticker on ESPNews that sits above Firefox's status bar. Just the best extension since the return of delicious delicacies.

There's more Mozilla and OSS stuff to talk about, but I just started the night shift today tonight last night, and I feel a lot like the guy with the Electro album stuck in his face in Shaun of the Dead right now. I'm gonna go have a beer and crash, and hopefully wake up in time to see the Griz beat the hell out of Toronto before heading back to work again.

The 360 Has Landed

But I won't be getting one just yet.
by GarrettJD - permalink

I've been watching the G4TV coverage of the countdown to the launch of the Xbox 360. However, I don't really feel any excitement over the launch. I hope all the new 360 owners enjoy the system, but for me, I just don't see a clear cut reason for me to fork over $400 for the system, plus $60 per game and some more for accessories. Basically, three reasons stand out to me right now:

1. I don't own an HD television. From what I've read (and seen in person), 360 games don't have a huge visual leap over Xbox games unless you're using an HD set. Since I won't be in the market for one of those for a while, I'm not eager to rush right out and get a 360.

2. There's no "killer app" at launch. Nintendo 64 had Mario 64, Dreamcast had Soul Calibur, and Xbox had Halo. As far as 360, well, Call of Duty 2 is probably the best choice, and Project Gotham Racing 3 looks nice, but there's no killer gaming experience here. Most of the launch games are rushed ports of regular Xbox games, with the added bonus of missing features. Look at Madden 06, which is missing the majority of features that the Xbox/PS2 versions offer.

3. I'm playing too many other great games right now, especially Half-Life 2 on Xbox, Guitar Hero on PS2, and Mario Kart DS on, well, the DS. Plus, with money being tight in this slumping economy, I don't feel like paying $60 a game right now for seemingly no reason.

Basically, the launch of the 360 hasn't excited me, which is disappointing, as I was there for the launch of the original Xbox on Day 1 in 2001. However, at that point I hadn't yet purchased a PS2, and my main gaming system was the Dreamcast, which by this time had sadly died an early death. I wanted a new gaming machine, PS2 didn't appeal to me, and Gamecube didn't have as many games as I wanted. So I went with Microsoft's unproven system, and it was a great investment.

I guess I'm holding the launch to an impossibly high standard, but I remember the Dreamcast launch, and how impressive it seemed in comparison. Still, I forsee getting a 360 around March or April of next year. That way, I'll have time to save some money, let demand subside, and hopefully get a later system that isn't plagued with the typical launch-day bugs.

Firefox earns some bragging rights.

Also, I just spilled some coffee on my desk.
by AC - permalink

A third release candidate for Firefox 1.5 appeared this morning. RC2 was so stable that there shouldn't be much of anything in RC3 testing to keep it from becoming the final build. As a lot of Opera people like to point out, Firefox is still a 4.9MB download, a third larger than Opera 8.5's 3.6MB. But 1.5 has had software auto-updating since some of the earliest branch nightlies, and the RC2 to RC3 update was a massive 218k. So you can now update Firefox roughly sixteen times faster than you can update Opera.

Also this morning OneStat reports that Firefox's usage share is now at 11.5% globally and 14.1% in the U.S. Netscape Browser is now at 0.26% worldwide, which honestly is just way too high. Opera is still under one percent after a big jump in downloads after 8.5 was released as freeware. I'm not sure why. There's no way average users have all tried Firefox with Adblock - or IE shells Avant Browser or Maxthon, which both have native adblocking - and couldn't go back to the new awful, flashing world the web has turned into. Then again, just about every non-IE user is a power user and knows all about adblocking.

Speaking of Maxthon, I tried it out for a couple of weeks and ultimately went back to Avant Browser. It's a little easier on the system resources than Avant, which is nice if you're tight on RAM. But the UI is bland and less thoughtfully laid-out, and the tab interface is less powerful and much buggier than Avant's. I was actually using Opera and K-Meleon both more than Maxthon, which is a quick ticket to uninstallation.

Sports Junkie update Vol. I

Nerds can be addicted to ESPNews, too.
by AC - permalink

I really hope that nobody anywhere is surprised that Terrell Owens has been suspended for the rest of the season by Eagles coach Andy Reid. You just can't present yourself as a leading candidate for Douchebag of the Year and expect nobody to notice, T.O. Just ask Kevin Federline.

Staying with football, I'm bound by law as a Tennessee native to hate the Colts, which is a shame as they're clearly the best team the NFL has seen is a good three or four years. Then again, jumping on the Indy bandwagon now would be like deciding to be a Bulls fan the year Jordan came back home from Birmingham. You might as well make a cardboard "Poser" sign and staple it to your forehead. Which actually would be a lot less painful than being a Titans fan this season.

Fortunately, we still have the Grizzlies. A lot of people got swept up by teams like the Clippers, Suns, Warriors, and Rockets, and conveniently missed the fact that the Griz made offseason moves that could easily put them into the Western Conference elite. Add to that a bigger, stronger, and more focused Pau Gasol, who is averaging 26 points, 9 rebounds, 4 assists, and 3 blocks so far, and you have a sleeper team who will quietly pound out wins to the All Star break, then cruise into the playoffs. I watched them do just that two seasons ago, and it's going to happen again. And this year the uniforms are way sweeter.

I heart OSS.

OSS means Open-Source Software. Learning is fun!
by AC - permalink

Lots of OSS news to get to this morning. First, after something like fifty-seven years of beta testing, OpenOffice 2.0 was released, uh, four days ago. Not sure how I missed that exactly. I still haven't even tried it though, because it's a 75MB installer for Windows, and my dial-up ISP won't let me finish a download like that without an executive order signed and sealed by President Nixon. And he's been dead for years.

Slashdot reports that a new OSS operating system called MINIX 3 is out. It uses an insanely tiny kernel, divides the user-mode into modules, and is just generally awesome:

...each device driver runs as a separate user-mode process so a bug in a driver (by far the biggest source of bugs in any operating system), cannot bring down the entire OS. In fact, most of the time when a driver crashes it is automatically replaced without requiring any user intervention, without requiring rebooting, and without affecting running programs.

MINIX 3 is available for download as a compressed CD image, and can be run directly from the CD-ROM. If you want to install it, you need a partition no larger than a Gigabyte. It's only 10 to 13MB, so give it a shot.

musikCube has jumped past the anticipated 0.93 version to a release candidate for 1.0. If you still haven't tried it, musikCube is an OSS mp3 player/collator with a simple, powerful interface, fantastic playback quality, plug-in support, and an infinitely customizable playlist generator. Yes, it's yet another mp3 player, but in only in the way that the sun is yet another star in the sky.

Finally, any minute now we should see the code freeze for Firefox 1.5 RC1. My last few holdout extensions auto-updated themselves yesterday and now work in Fx 1.5 beta 2, which is a good sign in itself. I think the really beautiful thing about 1.5 is that you can't immediately tell that it's any different from 1.0.7, but as you come across the changes, they're universally good. It works from a technical and end-user standpoint, something it seems like you never see in non-OSS software updates.

Lots of Firefox, with a little Netscape and Opera.

Just like in real life.
by AC - permalink

Spread Firefox is back online, just in time to pick up a nice little award for best marketing campaign from the UK Linux and Open Source Awards 2005. Gervase Markham even has a picture of it. The entire SFx site was taken down and rewritten from scratch following another hack. Oh, those crazy hackers and their crazy schemes.

Firefox hit the 100 million download mark just after SFx went back up, prompting an immediate forum blitz from the "it's popular so it sucks" crowd, who seem to think Mozilla is claiming a hundred million unique users for Firefox, which they aren't, and claiming that the numbers are misleading because they have personally downloaded Firefox seventeen times, which they haven't. You gotta love the fanboys. God only knows what they're actually fans of, but they're always crystal clear on what they're not fans of.

Netscape Browser has been updated to 8.0.4, incorporating the Firefox 1.0.7 security and stability fixes. For the record, Fx 1.0.7 was released a month ago. Way to stay on top of things, guys.

And a new Opera beta has surfaced at BetaNews. It seems to consist entirely of UI tweaks, so I don't know why the version number is being bumped from 8.5 to 9, but there it is. Unlike Netscape, which took a great browser in Firefox and turned it into a horrible mess, Opera just keeps getting better, and downloads have increased by a factor of four since the transition from adware to freeware. Good times.

I just realized that Firefox can do multiple-undo's. That's awesome.

Portable Mozilla and Fiona's third LP.

Extraordinary Machine was worth the wait.
by AC - permalink

Asa brings to our attention tonight a 2GB Memorex USB stick that comes preloaded with Thunderbird. It's meant to be a travel companion and includes Tbird as an easy way to access third-party email on the road. Remember, the more people exposed to Thunderbird, the more people will begin to realize that Outlook is a load of shit.

For whatever reason, Slashdot ran a post/link for the Firemonger Project today. This isn't a bad thing, of course. Firemonger is a sort of unofficial guerilla marketing campaign for Firefox and Thunderbird, and the more exposure it gets, the better. Firemonger is essentially a burnable CD image consisting of Firefox 1.0.7, Thunderbird 1.0.7, and a long list of plug-ins, extensions, and themes, along with documentation to help new users make the switch from IE and Outlook.

I've been preoccupied with Fiona Apple's new album Extraordinary Machine lately, and haven't thought about much else lately besides, of course, Ghost Recon, which I'm also obsessed with. I read Josh Modell's review of Machine at the AV Club, and within five minutes my copy was on order from Amazon along with a copy of Fiona's first album, Tidal, a CD I used to have two of, but somehow over the years I ended up with none of. Machine is clearly Fiona's and Fiona's alone, meaning there's just no way to categorize it, except to place it alongside Tidal and When the Pawn... My copy came as a dual-disc. The DVD side has live performances of a few songs from the new record and two from When the Pawn..., plus the video for Not About Love, which is as funny as it is awesome. It also has the DVD-audio version of the album, and it sounds so ridiculously good that there's just no reason whatsoever to flip the disc over to the CD side.

HP has bad decision-making skills.

Netscape is great and all, until you try to use it.
by AC - permalink

Netscape has managed to haul itself into the browser spotlight this week by signing a deal with HP to include Netscape Browser 8.0 on all new HP and Compaq desktops and laptops. From Ars Technica's article:

Those purchasing HP- or Compaq-branded consumer machines will be prompted during the set-up process to choose between Netscape 8.0 and current default Internet Explorer. Users will also find Netscape's icon on their desktop [and] in the Start menu, and the browser will be customized with links to HP sites.

Wow, that sounds like a really good deal, unless of course you're buying a new HP or Compaq. "Thank you for purchasing a new HP desktop computer! Which awful browser would you like to use today?" Let's see, we have Netscape, which is needlessly complicated and difficult to use, and IE6, which is dangerously vulnerable and has a shamelessly primitive UI.

Just get Firefox or Opera and tell HP to screw off. You'll be much happier in the end.

I finally got tired of not having the Show Image extension for Firefox 1.5 beta 1 and decided to do something about it myself. Suspecting that there was no reason this extension should be broken in the 1.5 branch, I took Alan Starr's advice and manually changed the em:maxVersion tag before reinstalling it. I'd been thinking about doing this with a few different extensions that hadn't yet been updated, but at this point only Image Zoom hasn't been upped for 1.5b1 (changing the maxVersion generates a chrome error in Fx 1.5 and SeaMonkey 1.0 alpha).

One more bit of Firefox news. Well, it isn't actually news since I bookmarked it over a week ago and immediately forgot about it. Brian King wrote a three-page article for O'Reilly Network called What Is Firefox. It ranges from Phoenix to the equally mythical Fx 2.0, and is interesting if not earth-shattering.

Sorry about not posting anything in so long. I picked up Ghost Recon Gold Edition last week (GR plus the Desert Siege and Island Thunder mission packs) and I'm completely addicted to it. It has its problems, and it's wicked hard, but I can't get enough of it. I'm already downloading mods, in fact. I know the whole squad-based tactical shooter thing is old now, but I never got around to playing any of them before now. The main issue I have with GR is the AI balancing. Enemy AI tends to run up near your position, stand completely hidden behind a solid object, and kill you with one magic bullet. Meanwhile, your teammates have a little game they like to play called "Let's catch stray bullets with our faces." But it's still a cool game.

AdBlock for Firefox is back.

Or at least, I've found a build that works.
by AC - permalink

Finally stumbled across an old build of Adblock (0.5.2 build 050) that seems to work in Firefox 1.5 beta 1. You can find the download in this old post (July 29th). The AdBlock at UMO won't install properly in 1.5b1, and AdBlock Plus hasn't been updated since the first of August, so I guess this is what we'll be using for now. Unless, of course, you're using Firefox 1.0.7 and not testing the new branch. In that case, um, nevermind.

This brings my working extension list in 1.5b1 back up to eleven, with four not yet updated (I've added several since my extension round-up a few weeks ago). I'm not sure what the second 1.5 beta's numerical designation will be, and whether all these extensions will have to up their max version tags again (1.5b1 is designated "1.4"). I wouldn't think so. But they will have to be updated for the final 1.5 release. Hopefully, though, the new versions will all be added to UMO, so that Firefox's built-in update tool, which will be significantly more robust than that in the current branch, will automatically catch and update them all.

I've been using this new Windowblinds theme called Iyin Vista obsessively since it was posted last week. It's built on the theme that, so far, most accurately emulates Windows Vista, only the Iyin version hs figured out how to cheat the transparent window borders. It's not a perfect effect, and it's not the most polished theme, but I love how it looks.

Firefox security tightened down.

Fx 1.0.7 released, and Opera begins to get on my nerves.
by AC - permalink

Firefox 1.0.7 was posted yesterday. This is another security update, really just a patch for a couple of newly uncovered vulnerbilities. It also provides a couple of stability fixes. I imagine this will be the last update for this branch of Firefox before 1.5 goes final.

I've been having a couple of issues with Opera since I started using it regularly a few weeks ago. First, there's the continual pain of manually deleting tracking cookies. Opera has a cookie manager, but all it really does is list your cookies and allow you to delete them individually. Why is it not possible to create a blacklist, as in Firefox? Incredibly, Netscape Browser 8.0.3.3 has the same issue. For god's sake, it's based on Firefox 1.x, so someone actually went to the trouble of removing this feature. What the hell?

The other problem I'm having with Opera involves my feeds list. After adding an eleventh RSS feed (and then another), messages started showing up under the wrong feed. So, for example, new messages from the Google Sci/Tech feed will also be displayed as new messages from Ars Technica and even this blog. New Slashdot messages also tend to show up under the wrong feed. I have no idea what's causing this, but it wasn't fixed from 8.02 to 8.5.

Still have not had any problems with Firefox 1.5 beta 1, but I haven't really been using it much. About half of my extensions have not been updated yet, including AdBlock, Show Image, and Wizz RSS Reader. I imagine that a lot of extension authors are just waiting for 1.5 final. Lame.

Opera finally gets it.

Meanwhile, Netscape shoots itself if the foot. Again.
by AC - permalink

This morning Opera 8.5 was released, and it's free. They've removed the ad banners, the registration, and the licensing fee. While this is obviously the big news, there's also the software itself. The changelog shows four security fixes, some minor tweaking, and "multiple stability fixes." The browser JavaScript tool is now included and active by default. I uninstalled Opera 8.02 immediately before installing 8.5, and all bookmarks, history, skins, and UI customization was carried over intact.

The other day I finally got fed up with Opera's default toolbar layout (navigation controls and address bar below the tabs) and changed it. I activated the rarely never-used Main bar, which is below the menu bar and above the tabs, took everything off of it, and dragged all the URL bar contents there (nav buttons, address bar and Go button, search form, and toggles for the View bar, panels, and wand). Now Opera looks and acts like a normal browser. With the default layout, the URL bar changes when displaying a "custom" tab - bookmarks manager, history, feeds viewer, etc. Now, none of my controls will disappear when viewing a custom tab; they may be greyed out, but at least I can see them. It's just easier to deal with.

Apparently tired of hearing how abhorrently hideous their new browser is, Netscape has released a browser theme kit, as well as a theme download center called the Netscape Theme Park. This might be the first time ever that a simple skin can actually improve the usability of an application.

Unfortunately, although there are a whopping five themes listed at the theme park, you can't actually install any of them. Clicking on one will take you to a page with more details about that theme. The "Install Theme" button you will then see simply links to the page you're already looking at. Brilliant. So you're stuck with that green mess. It's so hard to find anything in that awful, cluttered theme that it's actually easier to just exit the program and download a different browser.

SeaMonkey has landed (sort of).

Not the best browser, but clearly it has the best name.
by AC - permalink

The first ever SeaMonkey alpha was released, um, two days ago. Guess I missed it. The changelog shows some nice feature additions and a ton of bug fixes over the Mozilla Suite it's based on. Once a beta is released, I'll have to give it a try. I'm using MozSuite less and less, so I might as well replace it with SeaMonkey (I think SM overwrites an existing Suite installation in the same way Firefox 1.5 beta replaces Fx 1.0.x).

And speaking of Firefox, a guy named Scott Berkun has posted his reasons for switching from IE to Firefox. This is notable because he was one of the head UI guys for IE1 through IE5. His reasons range from Fx's smooth and unobtrusive handling of security to "IE is a ghetto." He also does a little nitpicking of the Fx UI: I agree that the "Go" menu should either be nested or done away with entirely, but I don't know what he's talking about here:

With multiple tabs (I find) the back/forward behavior becomes complex and hard to predict. Strict UI logic would put the tab UI above the toolbars, not below, but that creates other problems.

Yes, like confusing the hell out of the average user. Opera does just what he's describing in his post, and it's my least favorite aspect of the browser. That, and the way it mysteriously axes nearly all of Blogger's Create Post features. I don't know what the hell that's about.

Anyway, I'm reading Berkun's post, and see that he was still working on IE through the release of IE5, and I'm thinking, "Well, he must have left pretty recently, right? I mean, IE is only on ver. 6 now." Wrong. He left Microsoft in 1999. I just love the numbers here. Internet Explorer, likely the most widely-used internet app on planet Earth, has seen only one major update in six years (no, I'm not counting IE5.5; it was a patch, at best). Wow.

The Revolution is Revolutionary

But can it really compete with PS3 and XB360?
by GarrettJD - permalink

Nintendo fans have been awaiting the Tokyo Game Show ever since Nintendo announced that they would be revealing more about thier next-gen system, the Revolution. Speculation has run rampant for a while now on how exactly the Nintendo Revolution would be, well, revolutionary. Well, now we know. IGN has some great coverage of everything so far, but, suffice it so say, Nintendo isn't trying to compete anymore with Sony or Microsoft. They've chosen to go their own direction.

The Revolution controller looks like a TV remote (and styled like the Ipod) with a large sensor on the end. Basically, the whole thing will work like a 3D mouse pointer thing, and enable new types of gaming and interaction. I can see how this type of controller could really change things, especially in the realm of FPS and adventure games. At the same time, Nintendo has basically forced third parties to innovate, since the Revolution probably won't be able to handle straight ports of more traditional style games. So, the question at this point is-- will the third parties like EA, Ubisoft, and others embrace this, or will they take the lazy route and simply drop support for Nintendo altogether? Only time will tell.

I'll withold judgement on the Revolution until I've had a chance to try it for myself, but I'm inrigued at the possibilities. Nintendo won me over with its innovations with the Nintendo DS, and Nintendo's grand experiment with a totally new type of control may work, if developers innovate and think outside the box.

CNET loves Firefox.

But not, apparently, Netscape.
by AC - permalink

Today CNET posted and article called The Power of 10, their top ten products of the past ten years (thanks to Asa for the link). They put Firefox at No. 5, ahead of the PalmPilot, the iMac, and The Sims, among others. That's pretty damn high praise. I'll go ahead and spoil the surprise by saying that the iPod, TiVo, Google, and Napster were the four products deemed more significant than Firefox since Sept. 1995.

At first blush, there's just one product I see that was badly overlooked. Netscape 2.0, released in 1996, was a turning point for the world wide web. The turning point, you could say. It was the first bit of software that could let virtually anyone find whatever they wanted to on the web. Netscape 1 was better than Mosaic and LYNX, but had virtually no distribution outside of academia. I can't recall ever even encountering IE 1. But Netscape 2 was user-friendly, and it was everywhere. It supported frames for god's sake! Frames!

Anyway. I went ahead and installed Firefox 1.5 beta 1. I know I said I wouldn't, but I was bored, so I did. It took the better part of an hour finding out which of my extensions had been updated to 1.5b and where to find the updated versions. Still no Adblock, but otherwise the transition has been smooth and easy. No crashes yet, and I haven't run into any incompatible sites. Once 1.5 goes final and the extension authors catch up, this is going to be a formidable browser.

Just finished re-reading Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel, The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, which has the greatest title of any book ever, lifted from one of Adams's later Hitchhikers' Guide novels. I'm not sure what's next. I was thinking about re-reading The Living Planet by David Attenborough for the first time in years and years, because I know there's an old copy somewhere in this house.

Yahoo trumps Google. Wait, what?

And MS acknowledges Opera. What the hell is happening today?
by AC - permalink

If you haven't heard yet, Yahoo! has begun an invite-only beta test for a completely revamped Yahoo! Mail service. From the early reviews, it seems to be the first web-based email client that actually gives you as much control as a desktop client. As you can see in this monstrous pile of screenshots courtesy of Zilla Smash! (no more !'s in this post), the new Yahoo Mail gives you a standard 3-pane UI, like Outlook Express or, more accurately, Thunderbird.

And it makes Gmail look charmingly antiquated. Not all new features have been integrated into the beta, so final judgement is withheld. It would be nice if Yahoo finally started offering free POP3 access. There are ways around it, of course, but they should be unnecessary.

But here's the really interesting bit (to me, anyways): the new service works in all major browsers within Windows and, I believe, Linux. But according to Macworld, it's only supported on the Mac in Firefox. This may be a peculiarity of the beta, or more likely an inaccurate report, because Safari is actually more standards-compliant than Firefox, and if it works in Firefox, it should also, in theory, work in Camino.

Google, meanwhile, has launched a beta Blog Search tool. Not surprisingly, there are already search forms all over Blogger.com. I noticed a few days ago that we're now at least partially indexed by Google, and we show up in Blog Search as well. However, posts older that this past June have not been indexed. I'll stick with the Yahoo site search form for now.

Going back for a moment to wider acceptance of alternative browsers, BetaNews, among others, reported yesterday that Microsoft has finally opened up its download center (MSDN) to Firefox and Opera. Just those two for now, but it's a start. Of course, Windows Update is still off limits unless you're willing to open up Internet Explorer. God help you.

And finally, if you're hesitant to install Firefox 1.5 beta 1 for fear of it being incompatible with your extensions, you can follow Bugzilla Bug 307381. In the comments, active extension authors are reporting when their respective extensions have been updated to comply with the new branch. All it generally involves is changing the maxversion tag to 1.4 (I know, it's confusing), and crossing one's fingers that something in the new Fx code doesn't break it. In any case, it's a safe bet that these guys will also make sure their stuff will then work with the final build of 1.5.

Revenge is Imminent

Tommorrow will hopefully be the day I'm able to pick up Burnout: Revenge for the Xbox. I've been waiting for this game, as I'm a huge fan of the Burnout series. I've been playing the games since Burnout 1 on the Gamecube, and I was glad to see the series finally come into popularity and acclaim with last year's Burnout 3: Takedown. B3 was my second favorite game of last year (behind Halo 2) and reviews like this one from Gamespot have me looking forward to a crashing good time.

I did make one good pickup earlier in the week. Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath (which I scored for just $10) is a criminally underrated game. It's a FPS, sort of-- you've never seen enemies, characters, and weapons this creative-- well, not since the last Oddworld game. I wasn't too big on Munch's Odyssey, but I'm really enjoying this one.

I also picked up the newly-released DVD of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I know a lot of die-hard Douglas Adams fans are split over the film, but I really dig it. Now that I've seen it three times (twice in theaters, once so far on DVD), the "missing" parts that so many people harp about don't really bother me. Repeated viewings of the film has allowed me to catch a lot of the little touches thrown in that you'd never get without being a fan. Overall, I think this film, more than anything else, does a great job in capturing the spirit of Douglas Adams' work. Hopefully, Disney/Touchstone will consider greenlighting a film version of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, despite mediocre U.S. box office.

And if you're a die-hard Pixar fan like myself, you probably already picked up the new 10th Anniversary Edition of Toy Story. I have the single-disc version already, but I couldn't resist the new 2-disc version, which has an absolutely stunning transfer, much like the last couple of Pixar DVDs. It was nice to be able to go back and revisit the movie that started Pixar's rise to computer-animation dominance (I'll refrain from any more gushing about The Incredibles, my favorite film of 2004.) However, I'm really looking forward to December 26, when the new edition of Toy Story 2 goes on sale-- I consider it superior to the original, and it was my favorite Pixar film before The Incredibles.

Another rant on betas and Opera.

If you're going to bash Firefox, at least know what you're talking about.
by AC - permalink

For whatever reason, nearly every unofficial Opera blog I see seems to think that bashing other browsers (specifically Firefox, even though IE is still dominating the market) is as good a way as any to promote their personal favorite. I just don't understand this. There's a blog called 30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover that I keep bookmarked for its fairly comprehensive rundown of Opera 8's features, and last Friday they took a misguided shot at Firefox 1.5 beta 1 for not yet being compatible with most 1.0.x extensions. Here's a tiny bit of it:

Well, Firefox was in “beta” for ages and of course “beta” is increasingly meaningless.

When talking about Firefox, “beta” means very little. Not as little as GMail, perhaps, but still, it has spent 90% of its life in beta.

If you want to go all the way back to the Phoenix/Firebird days, then sure, Firefox was in beta for a long while. But Phoenix was never meant to be a widely-used, mainstream browser, not until Firefox 1.0 was released last November. Since then, six finalized versions have been released to fix security flaws (this is a good thing). Because Fx is open-source software - and therefore a collaborative effort - all six were openly beta-tested, generally for about 48 hours. Firefox 1.5 is based on a new branch of the Gecko rendering engine, and has taken significantly longer to test.

But the point is, just because there's a beta of a new version of Fx being tested, it doesn't mean there isn't still a stable, official release available. There is, and there has been for ten months now.

I think the problem the die-hard Opera users are having comes from not fully understaning how open-source software like Firefox is created. Every single new build (and there's a new one literally every day) is made available to anyone who wants it. New versions aren't tested in-house for a while before a beta is made public, shortly followed by a final build.

This isn't Opera, it's OSS. If you're not beta-testing, don't use a beta. I don't know how I can say this more clearly.

And by the way, I'm not bashing Opera itself. I'm writing this post in Opera, and I use it almost daily. I think what the Firefox-bashing Opera users need to realize is that as one browser gets better, they all have to get better. Do you think it's a coincidence that Microsoft, after years of letting Internet Explorer stagnate, is suddenly crashing development of IE7 now that Mozilla has released a better browser and is steadily taking away market share a few ticks of a percent at a time? Opera's market share has not made as big a dent, but Opera, like Firefox, is vastly superior to IE, and that has to be another reason that IE7's target release date has been moved up by over a year.

So why don't we try to stop slamming each other's perferred browsers just to make our own look superior, and focus on the real enemies: terrorists, reality television, and J-Lo's self-branded mini marketing empire.

I'm not testing that.

Know what you're getting yourself into.
by AC - permalink

As much as I like to help out the Mozilla Foundation by beta-testing their new releases, I've just had too many problems with Deer Park to install Firefox 1.5 beta 1. More than 5,000 bugs have already been squashed in this branch, and it looks like there are still some impressive ones hanging around. Thunderbird 1.5 beta 1 hasn't had as many problems, and I'll probably test the second beta.

I worry sometimes about the distribution of pre-final Firefox builds. I noticed that the candidate builds for 1.5 beta 1 were posted at the BetaNews FileForum. Unless you're actively involved in bug-squashing for Mozilla, keep in mind that you should steer clear of anything called a release candidate, a pre-beta, or an alpha. Mozilla final releases are as thoroughly vetted and tested as any software anywhere, and you should stick with those unless you're aware of the risks inherent to beta-testing.

Anyway. I finally got around to picking up a copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon this weekend. I've never actually owned my own copy, and I've been meaning to finally get one since seeing them on perform for Live 8 from London. They were as good as they've ever been, which is astonishing. I also grabbed a two-disc compilation of Pearl Jam b-sides called Lost Dogs. All I really wanted was "Last Kiss" and "Hard to Imagine," and now I've got those plus 28 other slightly obscure, somewhat esoteric songs. "Bee Girl" is just plain weird. And "Sweet Lew" is about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. If you're wondering why Pearl Jam recorded a song about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, so am I. Can't imagine why it never made it onto an album.

Microsoft doesn't like you.

But Blake does. And so does The Onion.
by AC - permalink

In an interview with Tom's Hardware posted yesterday, Firefox co-creator Blake Ross was asked what he thinks is the biggest difference between Firefox and Internet Explorer:

Microsoft is here to win. That's great if you're a shareholder, but how many users appreciated that attitude when spyware and pop-ups filled their screens four years ago, and Microsoft, having crushed Netscape, abandoned the market? The company is back now that competition has arisen, but where will it be in four more years?

The Mozilla Foundation isn't fighting a war on competition; it's fighting a war on complexity. Our users are our shareholders, and as long as the Internet is frustrating, we'll be here.

Ross also mentioned something interesting that I hadn't heard before. Seems the growing market share of all the standards-compliant web browsers (i.e. everything but IE) is starting to put a dent in the Explorer-only internet and intranet applications market:

We used to have a full evangelism team that worked with IE-only companies to support Web standards. Fortunately, we've reached the tipping point in terms of market share where companies are now forced to open up or risk losing 10% of their clientele. So while we still make evangelism efforts, these kinds of problems are beginning to disappear naturally.

The rest of the short interview isn't all that interesting, but may be worth a look.

Turning from Tom's Hardware to My Hardware, I installed a new hard drive in my PC this weekend. (Do not question my segueing abilities!) The 10GB Quantum HD in my mom's old Compaq started making nasty clicking noises, which pretty much means it's dead and gone forever. So I formatted the 30GB Western Digital I use as a backup from NTFS to FAT32 and stuck it in her PC, and installed Win98 SE on it. Then I replaced it in my box with a shiny, new (but cheap) Maxtor 100GB, 7800 RPM drive. I still only have a total of 140GB of storage here, but it's still more than I need. I don't even have a DVD burner or broadband, and it took me six months to effectively fill up the 70GB I had before.

Something else I've been meaning to post for a while now: The Onion has completely opened up its news archives. This is probably the biggest source of comedy on the damned web now, and I've been trolling through it for a few days. This goes along with a redesign of the front page and a total overhaul of The A.V. Club. Good times.

Oh, and I added Blogger's image/word verification feature to the comments. Hopefully this will stop the comment spambots that started to pop up here this week.

Opera 8.02 reviewed.

Opera 8.02 ranks among the browser elite, but is it better than Firefox?
by AC - permalink

It's been one week now since I got my greedy little fingers on a registered, ad-free edition of Opera 8.02. I've been splitting time between Opera, Firefox, and Avant Browser, and I've collected a few notes. First, the good news.

Lots of bugs appear to have been fixed since the Opera 8 beta I last tested. The browser hasn't crashed or locked once, though it did hang for nearly a minute once when I tried to close the Feeds tab while another site loaded in a background tab. No idea why. I've noticed a few other fixes here and there, like the Blogger preview function works now.

The overall UI still takes some getting used to. The navigation controls and URL bar are still tied into the currently active tab, so that closing all tabs leaves you with nothing but the Personal bar. It's a little weird. I had to do some customizing to the default layout. I removed the search fields from the Personal bar - they were both commercial, I believe - and dragged all my bookmark folders there instead. I left the Google search field on the Navigation bar, added a Panels toggle, and replaced the back and forward buttons with ones with drop-down arrows. I also had to lose the "fast-forward" and "rewind" buttons. This can all be done by drag-and-drop from the customize toolbars dialog, just like Firefox. There's also a Main bar, active by default, that seems totally useless in day-to-day browsing.

Page rendering in Opera is good, but can be a little wonky, mostly in the interpretation of font settings. The wrong one might be used, or it will be slightly too small or too large (as compared to the same site rendered by Gecko or Explorer). Big picture, though, Opera is just as standards-compliant as Firefox, and of course moreso than IE6.

In-dialog skins browsing via an Opera-hosted web server is much simpler than searching for themes across multiple sites, like virtually every other skinnable app ever. Unfortunately, Opera's servers have been wavering between slow-as-hell and completely-dead all day. Could be added traffic from the free-for-a-day promotion. In any case, there are some extremely good skins available, and they can be changed on-the-fly, unlike (to my knowledge) every Gecko-based browser.

The tab UI is generally good, a little slicker maybe than Firefox's, and provides a close button on each tab by default, something I love that can be done in Fx with an extention called Tab Mix Plus. Tab Mix also lets you reorder tabs by dragging them, another native Opera feature. But Opera's variable-width tabs based on length of the title of each web page is annoying.

Now for the not-great news. Opera has a useful array of sidebars, called panels, but to access them you need the Panels toolbar, which is a big fat vertical toolbar on the left edge of the screen. The Panels bar is just a list of the different panels, and can be moved, but the sidebar itself apparently cannot be displayed without it there, even though the sidebar's header contains a drop-down menu listing the panels. It's redundant UI that eats up screen space for no real reason.

Anyway, the panels include Bookmarks (lets you manage bookmarks in the sidebar, identical to Fx); Notes (really handy little widget that basically lets you keep a list of notes, displayed in the bottom half of the sidebar below the list); Transfers (the download manager, but it works best in its own tab, where it lives by default anyway). The History panel is a disappointment. The history is displayed as one massive list and seems almost useless compared to Firefox, which gives you five options for sorting the history. The Links panel is better, it simply collates all the links on the active page and lists 'em for you; haven't found a use for it yet, but someday I might. You also get a page Info panel.

If you've set up Opera's email client, you'll also get an email panel. I don't recommend it. The panel is simply Opera's mail client crammed into the sidebar. The problem, however, is the client itself. Opera calls it "revolutionary," and it's definitely small and fast. But it's also dated and lacking in features. Thunderbird is a far superior email client. Hell, I'd rather use webmail.

The other major problem is that Opera's RSS interface is tied into its mail client. Without an email account set up, the Feeds interface is actually pretty good. It's fast and intuitive and better than Fx's LiveBookmarks. You can set each feed to check for updates at a different interval, ranging from once every five minutes to once a week. Only basic content is shown in the feed viewer; it doesn't render the actual web page like Thunderbird, which is either good or bad, depending on personal taste, and you can always open the feed in a new tab with a click. You do have to delete the feeds yourself or they'll just keep piling up; they don't auto-update like with LiveBookmarks or the Wizz RSS reader Fx extension.

Unfortunately, with the mail client active, new RSS items are treated just like mail, and it becomes overly complicated dealing with more than just one or two feeds, especially if you get a lot of mail. This is probably the biggest problem I have with Opera's email client - it makes browsing RSS feeds a pain in the ass.

I also have a problem with the way Opera handles cookies. The default cookie manager is decent, better than many browsers. But there doesn't seem to a way to create a cookie blacklist, a killer Firefox feature. And I had another issue: I use an exclusion cookie when reading this blog, so that my hits don't register when I'm looking at the site traffic. The cookie works in Firefox and Avant, but Opera seems to be ignoring it.

The biggest deal-breaker for most of us, particularly Firefox users, is Opera's lack of adblocking. As Nitin Bhargava put it, "Where's my adblock?" AdBlock Plus is the essential Fx extension, and even little Avant Browser now has native adblocking, arguably even better than Fx's. Adblocking is actually possible in Opera. There are several methods, but the easiest is by creating a file called filter.ini in the profile directory, then altering opera6.ini to refer to it. If you have a long blacklist in AdBlock for Firefox, you can export the list to a textfile and just alter that. Unfortunately, there's a bug in Opera (or is it a feature?) that seems to make the browser arbitrarily ignore blacklisted URLs, so that many ads will appear anyway, and iframes always seem to get through.

There's also the little matter of the big, attention-grabbing ad banners at the top of the browser window itself in the free version of Opera. The reason I've been playing with Opera for as long as a week is that I was lucky enough to get a free registration code during the ten-year-anniversary promotion last week. But if you weren't so lucky, the big question is simple: Is Opera 8.02 good enough to use despite the annoying ads, or even good enough to drop $39 U.S. for a registered version? It might be, if you've got the disposable income. If you run at a high screen-res (1280 or above), you might be able to put up with the ad banners (though I never could). 8.02 is clearly the best Opera so far, much, much better than 7.x.

All I can really tell you is that I'm going to keep using it, probably more than I use Avant, K-Meleon, or the Mozilla Suite. But Firefox 1.0.6 will remain the default browser on my system, and it won't be replaced until Firefox 1.5 is released shortly. Firefox still offers the best total package in the best interface, with the best extendibility. But for registered users, Opera has claimed second-place.

Cheap Greatest Hits and In Event of An Emergency

No big deals in my shopping this weekend, but I did pick up a few of the new PS2 Greatest Hits games, which Circuit City has on sale this week 2 for $30. I picked up Sly 2: Band of Thieves, Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Jak 3, and Hot Shots Golf: Fore! Fortunately, I found them all in their original packaging, and not the ugly, red bar Greatest Hits packaging. I have to go back to work tomorrow after my nice long vacation, but that's all right. I had a nice rest, and I'm ready to get back to it.

To me, the scariest thing about what happened in New Orleans is the attempt by the federal government to shift the blame for the tragedy on the local authorities in New Orleans and Louisiana, and the realization that we can't rely on the federal government to help us out in the case of disaster. It's probably not well known outside of here, but here in Memphis we're sitting near the New Madrid fault line, which is, as any geologist would tell you, overdue for a major, 8.0 plus earthquake in the next several years. If that were to happen here, I hope the city of Memphis and Shelby County is prepared to handle all disaster relief and recovery efforts alone, because based on what we've seen in the last several days from FEMA, we can't rely on anyone else for help.

More Opera Soon, and an Update on New Orleans

I've been doing some pretty serious tinkering with Opera 8.02 for a few days now, and I'm sporadically compiling a fairly in-depth review of it. I've been typing in a few notes in the Notes field of Opera's panels bar, which is a nice little feature. There are quite a lot of things I need to say about it. Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is now a week away, but I won't be testing it; based on my experiences with Deer Park, it's probably going to be more trouble that it's worth for someone not directly involved with beta testing for the Mozilla Foundation. So I have plenty of time to kill writing up something decent on Opera.

In case you haven't seen it yet, there's an incredible blog being maintained from inside the hell that New Orleans has become called The Interdictor. It's run by the crisis manager for a company called DirecNIC. He and his crew are holding down a highrise and are making it a priority to make sure everyone knows what's going on down there. The most interesting thing is the right-turn in perspective they're giving us. If you're watching the news, you know already that every elected politician in the country seems to be doing everything they can to point out that things are not nearly as dire as the mainstream media are making it seem with their coverage. This guy, however, is pointing out that everyone he talks to is pissed as hell that the media is making things look much, much better than they actually are.

So a question organically appears here: Who has the incentive to lie, or to decieve themselves into believing one perspective or the other? The people on the ground dealing with the flooding, looting, crime, and lack of external support, or the VIPs who have to answer to the people in the voting booths?

Anyway, the blog is also worth checking out for this guy's masterful ability to come up with simple quotes that sum up an entire tragedy. "It takes a spectacular kind of asshole to set a fire in this environment." "It's hot as hell down there in the sun. Crime is absolutely rampant: rapes, murders, rape-murder combinations." "It is a zoo out there... it's the wild kingdom. It's Lord of the Flies. That doesn't mean there's murder on every street corner. But what it does mean is that the rule of law has collapsed, that there is no order... Anyone who is on the streets is in immediate danger of being robbed and killed. It's that bad."

Tragedy in the Big Easy

I'm sitting here watching the video and images from Hurricane Katrina on the Weather Channel, and I just can't believe what I'm seeing and hearing. The cities of New Orleans and Gulfport are basically gone. I've been to both cities, and I just can't believe the magnitude and power of this storm. I feel for everyone affected by this, and hope everyone will be able to bounce back. I mean, 80% of New Orleans is underwater-- I just don't see how they will be able to come back from this.

Katrina was one powerful storm-- powerful enough to affect us here in Memphis. It was still a tropical storm when it passed through here knocking out power to 74,000 customers, including me. Thankfully, the utility company seemed to be prepared, as we got back power yesterday evening, about 18 hours after we lost it.

I'm on vacation this week, and I've spent most of my time on the internet and working on editing my video from my Disney vacation. I was inspired into video editing by Robb and Elissa Alvey over at Theme Park Review, who turn out some great theme park videos, many of which you can download from their website or buy on DVD. If you're a theme park junkie like me, their DVDs are well worth the money.

I'm going out grocery shopping tomorrow, so I will probably hit up a couple of Targets and whatnot on a lookout for bargain games. I'll report back here if I find anything good.

All Firefox, All the Time

Lots of Firefox stuff to cover tonight. Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is now officially scheduled for a Sept. 9 release. Lockdown on the code will be at midnight on the 7th. Fx developers have also decided to add a second beta before 1.5 is finalized, pushing that release back somewhat. If you've been testing Deer Park, you know why. There have been some major bugs in the new Gecko branch, and it will definitely take some time to iron them all flat. In the end, all the extra testing and feedback will be worth it, though.

Lockergnome's web developers RSS channel started adding a daily Firefox item about a week ago. Nothing earth-shattering has appeared so far, but there have been a couple of interesting posts.

First, there's BackupFox, a small app that will make a backup of all your extensions, bookmarks, preferences, history, etc., in .zip format. It works with Firefox as well as Thunderbird. Should be useful if a nightly build should happen to irreparably corrupt your userChrome files.

Lockergnome also mentioned an article on I-Hacked.com called Firefox Browser Hacking. While there are some good ideas here, and links to some useful extensions, there's very little hacking going on. It's sort of a quick 'n dirty guide to customizing Fx for hackers, which doesn't make a lot of sense, as most of them have been using it for a year now.

Finally, according to this Slashdot post, there's a "plug-in" available now that attempts to turn Internet Explorer into Firefox by adding tabs, a search box, and a small firewall that should cover most of the IE security holes plugged by the Gecko rendering engine. Right now I don't know if this is actual software or wishful thinking, as the site referred to, getfoxie.com, appears to have been slashdotted and is unavailable. I suppose I could troll the comments, but I don't do that. It's always more aggravating than enlightening. But I will quote the first-poster, fembots: "What I need is a Firefox-plugin that looks exactly like IE (including the lack of tabs and search box) while still providing the same level of security."

Opera Almost Figures It Out

Something very unusual to going on today. Opera is finally offering free registration for their browser. Problem is, it's just for today. In case anyone's interested, go to this page and submit an email address and you'll be given a registration code. Then you can download the browser, register it, and those ad banners go "poof." Thanks to Nitin for pointing this out.

This is celebration of Opera's ten-year anniversary, and I think it's a great idea. Adware sucks and everyone hates it, so most people don't even give Opera a chance. Unfortunately, the ones who do generally decide that it just ain't worth forty bucks. But we all love free stuff, so don't be surprised if Opera hits a record for new users today. Maybe it'll finally wake them up to a simple fact that's been staring them in the face for years: Netscape was crushed by Microsoft in part because they started charging for Communicator Gold. The free, stripped down Netscape browser was the most dominant piece of software the internet had yet seen, but bloating it up and slapping on a price tag neatly killed it.

As soon as Opera figures this out, the better off they'll be. I don't know what their business model is, but making the product free would push their market share back up (it's been declining for months), meaning a bigger audience, and leading to improvements in the software. Suddenly Mozilla is looking back over their shoulder, and all the browsers get better.

But this won't happen. Opera is still too pricey, and the UI is still way to cluttered and confusing. Right now, your best bet remains Firefox, but I figure if it's free and the ads are gone, I'll give Opera another shot.

Thirteen Essential Firefox Extensions

So here's the comprehensive list of Firefox extensions I use that I've been wanting to post for months. You can download these extensions from the links provided. A couple of these have been updated from the version noted, but I'm only listing the versions I'm using as of this evening. This way you know that I've tested them in Fx 1.0.6, under Win XP Pro. I'm going in alphabetical order.

• AdBlock Plus 0.5.9 - One of my favorite browser enhancements ever, it inspired native ad blocking in a number of browsers, including Avant, the best IE shell.


• Delicious Delicacies 0.4.1 - The definition of a useless extension, it simply replaces the definition of "cookie" in the advanced prefwindow pane with the jokey temporary one that lived there for several months before Firefox became a household name. I love it.


• Download Manager Tweak 0.6.6 - Most useful feature is moving the download manager into its own tab, Opera-style. This view gives you info you normally wouldn't have in Fx, including file URL and target location.


• FlatStyle 0.9.1.3 - Creates MS Office-style context menus and, more importantly, lets you drop the dropdown arrows on the back/forward buttons (right-click for menus). This looks great but makes a number of custom themes jumpy, so I disable it from time to time.


• Image Zoom 0.1.7.1 - Gives you a bunch of context menu-based options for zooming into and out of images. Should really be a standard Fx feature. Highly customizable.


• LiveBookmarkThis 0.2 - Another feature that should be standard, lets you add RSS or Atom feeds to your LiveBookmarks with a right-click.


• MenuX 0.2.2.15 - Adds no less than thirty additional toolbar buttons to pick and choose from, including buttons for the extension and theme managers. Also allows you to hide the menubar. Highly recommended.


• Save Image in Folder 0.5.1 - Adds a customizable option to the context menu that shows up when you right click an image. You can quickly drop a bmp, png, gif, or jpg into any folder that you add to the list. Convenient as hell.


• Save Text Area 0.2 - Right-click in a text area to get the option of loading a text file's contents into it. Very useful if you're worried about writing a lengthy post, only to have a remote server crap out and lose your data. I'm using it to write this post.


• Show Image 0.3 - An old IE feature, lets you right-click on an image placeholder for a graphic that didn't load (or if you hit Stop before the images loaded) to force it to load. I use it every day.


• Tab Mix Plus 0.2.4 - Unquestionably the best tab extension for Fx. Gives you every option you could need, including tab focusing and appearance tweaks like putting a close button on every tab (Opera's best feature). Can be buggy on install, but absolutely worth the trouble.


• WellRounded 0.41 - An aesthetic extension, it creates rounded ends for the URL bar, search bar, and history and bookmarks sidebar searches. Doesn't work with a lot of custom themes, but makes many, including the default theme and Qute, look fantastic.


• Wizz RSS News Reader 1.1.2 - Easily the best RSS reader/aggregator I've come across so far. Integrates fairly well into Fx, though the interface isn't particularly intuitive. But given a chance, it becomes addictive. It has to compete with Fx's native LiveBookmarks, and I think which one is better is a matter of personal preference, but if you want to sort through a couple dozen or more feeds daily, like I do, Wizz RSS wins out.

If there's a Fx extension that you can't live without that I haven't listed here, post it in the comments. I already know that Garrett has a BugMeNot extension that I haven't been able to find, so I'm waiting for that link. I've put off listing my Thunderbird extensions until I have more than four installed. I just don't get that much email, I'm afraid.

The GIMP is Ugly

Slashdot is reporting today that open-source graphic app The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) signed up with OpenUsability to help improve its UI. And it's about goddamn time. I love the GIMP, but it's just a huge pain in the ass to get anything done with it, especially if you're a non-*nix guy who cut his IMP teeth with Photoshop (Photoshop 3 for Win 3.1, actually).

In even better news, G4, the mess that morphed out of TechTV, is bringing back Call for Help, and Leo Laporte is back to host (no Cat Schwartz, though). I'd be a bit happier if AOTS brought back Patrick Norton and Megan Morrone, but I'll take what I can get.

Last week Yahoo News published three articles to introduce the average user to open-source software. Is Open Source for You? is your standard encyclopedia-esque intro to OSS and OS web projects. Open-Source for All is basically a FAQ for anyone who still doesn't get it, and The Open-Source PC is a rundown of a few of the major OSS options you have (Firefox, Thunderbird, Celestia, OpenOffice, etc.). No mention of musikCube, though.

And lastly I'll mention that FireTune 1.0.6 is out. This is a standalone app (no installer) that is, essentially, a wizard for making a few performance tweaks to Firefox's about:config. I've used it before, but only once. I wouldn't bother with it.

Hulk Smash

If you're looking for a great action game, one of the best I've played in a long, long time, go out right now and pick up The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube. Yes, I know-- licensed games are usually crap, the last Hulk game sucked, I don't care about the Hulk, yadda yadda yadda-- if you enjoy action games, at least give this one a rent. I've been playing it nonstop for almost two days, and it's damn fun. If you're still not convinced, read this review at Gamespy. This game just came out of nowhere, and has to be one of the biggest surprises of the year.

Other than that I've picked up more cheapass games at Target. I love Target for their red-sticker clearance sales, where you can find games for 5 bucks, or sometimes even less. The best internet reasource for cheap games is Cheap Ass Gamer. I visit their message board almost every day to get the latest on great game deals. This site is how I acquire so many games-- most of them I pad less that 20 bucks for, and a lot of those, less than ten bucks.

Puppies and Hedgehogs

I write about how I haven't bought a new Gamecube game in months, then I turn around and buy one a few days later. I picked up Sonic Gems Collection a couple of days ago. My verdict: unless you're a diehard Sonic fan like myself, it's not really worth your $29.99. Sonic CD is the highlight of the collection, and even then I think it's overrated-- it's a good game, but gameplay-wise it's easily topped by both Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Sonic the Fighters is nice to have in a collection, as it never saw a home release, but it's pretty much a dummied down version of Virtua Fighter. And despite what many critics have said, I actually enjoy Sonic R, but it hasn't held up very well. (Except for the fabulously cheesy soundtrack.) The six Game Gear games in the collection are worthless; why the hell would I want to play a Game Gear game blown up to huge proportions on my television? It looks awful. Vectorman and Vectorman 2 round out the collection, and are actually two of the better games on the disc. What pisses me off the most about Sonic Gems Collection is that Sega of America actually removed three of the games from the Japanese version (Streets of Rage 1, 2, and 3), supposedly so the game wouldn't get a Teen rating. What utter bull.

Faring better in my new game purchases is Nintendogs, which, despite being mind-numbingly cute, is actually a pretty neat use of the Nintendo DS's capabilities. So far I have a chocolate lab puppy named Mario, and I've taught him how to sit, lie down, roll over, and shake. I'm trying to teach him to chase his tail next. Yes, this sounds utterly goofy, and it is, but it's pretty fun all the same.

In my earlier rant about EA and Madden, I forgot to say something about Blitz: The League. I might consider picking this one up. Basically, Midway, having lost the NFL license, decided to make Blitz into the most over-the-top football game imaginable. Apparently, they hired the writer for Playmakers (the ESPN football drama forced off the air by the NFL) to write the storyline. I'm intrigued, and the Blitz games have always been pretty fun. I'll be waiting to see how this turns out.

Oh yeah, and I'm officially on vacation now. I have two weeks left to take before the end of October, and next week will be the first one. Of course, I'm not going anywhere... but if someone walked up to me and handed me a thousand bucks, I'd be off to Walt Disney World in a heartbeat. However, I don't see that happening, so I'm basically going to sit around for a week, watch movies, and play video games. On second thought, that's a vacation enough for me.

Site Search is Live

And it actually works. I ditched the Google SiteSearch and put up a modified Yahoo! search form I found on another site. I suppose eventually this blog will get indexed by Google, but we're already on Yahoo, so the hell with it. While I was looking for the code, I found out that Yahoo does still make a small search form available as a part of their "media relations," but apparently you just have to hack it to limit the search to one indexed URL. So anyway, it works, and it's freakin' sweet.