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.