WebM support has been added to Firefox trunk. “Today I landed Firefox’s WebM support on mozilla-central, our Firefox development branch. It should appear in nightly builds from tonight onwards. Firefox should build with WebM support without needing any extra changes to your build configuration, unless you’re building on Win32, where you’ll need to have MASM installed in order to compile libvpx’s optimized assembly.”
Uhh, people still use this outdated browser? (windows port)
Well, here on Windows 2000, it’s actually a very sensible alternative to IE6 ^^ Seriously, it’s a pretty good web browser, I don’t understand why people recently started to bash it. I’ve had my Chromium period, and still think that it’s the best browser available in terms of usability and speed, but if you don’t want -webkit proprietary tags to rule the web or Google to spy on everything you do, Firefox remains the most sensible choice…
(And no, Windows 2000 is not outdated, until Microsoft make another good release of Windows =p)
Edited 2010-06-10 07:49 UTC
Up until recently, I used to regularly run Opera on Windows 2000.
The only reason I stopped is because I’ve moved and not brought that particular computer with me.
Chrome’s speed is awesome but I miss a lot of the functionality and possibilities of Firefox. Playing well with portable apps and the awesomebar with the tagging system are features that I haven’t found in Chrome or Opera. With 10.60 Opera has become my second browser because it is almost as fast as Chrome but has a lot of the features of Firefox that I want(but not the awesomebar sadly).
Well, that’s strange, because I thought that the Firefox guys got inspiration from opera for the awesome bar. What functionality exactly are you missing ?
Yes, you’re right. What Firefox calls the awesomebar has been in Opera for some time now. Maybe even since 9.60
People have always bashed Opera even more than Firefox these days, but I have seen more features Opera pioneered brought into Firefox (awesomebar, skins) and other browsers than the other way round. In fact, the only thing I saw copied from Firefox into Opera is the “do you want to save this password” ribbon that appears at the top of the page. On Opera, the Wand (recently renamed “password manager”) used to display a popup dialog that was modal, and has been changed to non-modal so that the user sees the password has been accepted before storing it.
Yes, Opera is closed-source. But it’s still the best browser in terms of speed, configuration and features available at hand combined. Personal opinion.
DISCLAIMER : This post includes personal opinion, too
Speed : Uncertain about this one. It’s noticeably faster than FF, sure, speed is a major area for improvement in the Gecko world. But is it faster than Chrome ? If I remember well, loading times for Opera 10 were much higher, and there was a noticeable delay when loading very small pages which doesn’t exist in Chrome.
Configuration : …but only if you’re ready to look for it everywhere in the menus. Firefox and Safari understood that an user does not want to hunt settings and must have everything in one place, while the Opera for desktop guys still have to understand this basic fact before I start using their browser for more than 1 month…
Features available at hand : True, but since most people only use the “browse the web” and “bookmark” features (plus some extras like password management), it sounds sensible to make the rest add-ons in order to keep the browser interface clean (unlike opera’s…)
No doubt that Opera is innovative, that’s why every single other browser steals from them. But there’s a difference between a good technological demo and a good web browser for everyday use, and in my opinion opera still fits in the first category and does not fit in the second category…
In my opinion again, guys like the Mozilla and the Chrome team know how to make software which is at the same time simple, sufficiently powerful, and a pleasure to use on a daily basis. Whereas guys like the IE team and the Opera team still have a lot to learn in that area…
Edited 2010-06-10 12:22 UTC
Well here you can find some quite fresh benchmarks for the browsers:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558-3.htm…
It’s quite interesting. Firefox comes off as quite slow, but their memory optimization when it comes to multiple pages pays off as it has the lowest memory usage when viewing multiple pages. Opera starts up fastest, Chrome is fastest in Javascript, Safari is fastest in HTML, CSS, Tables, etc
My personal choice is still Firefox, apart from it just being so familiar there’s all the plugins and all the Greasemonkey scripts I’ve become addicted to.
Chrome is fast and polished and most likely the one I would switch to if I ever did.
But like Laurence said, each to his own. And in that respect it’s great that we have such a wide array of browsers to choose from, all free.
edit: I spell like a cow
Edited 2010-06-10 13:37 UTC
The upcoming Firefox 4 (with Jagermonkey JIT Javascript compiler) promises to address the Javascript speed issue with Firefox.
http://news.downloadatoz.com/firefox-4-sneak-peek-multi-touch-open-…
It is perhaps about as far away as IE9 is.
Edited 2010-06-10 13:40 UTC
Yes, Opera is not the fastest (as it once used to be, which quite everybody agrees on, including die-hard fans of other browsers) but, unlike IE which has always been the turtle, the distance is not that large and Opera comes back amongst the top 1, 2 or 3 each time. The engines (especially for Javascript) are not the same as in 10.0 to the point that I praised them on their forum for how fast the current 10.53 is on Mac OS X (the change from 10.10 and the next version I used, 10.51, was truly a giant leap) and someone said on their forum that 10.50 should have been 11.0… But I wrote “it’s still the best browser in terms of speed, configuration and features available at hand combined.” Wrote that thinking of Mac OS, great OS but so not configurable.
Ouch… you’re harsh. There’s the preference windows (cmd+comma on Mac), the appearance preferences window for skins, buttons and panels, and the opera:config for advanced tweaking, which FF also has at about:config.
True, but that’s what I like. Want extensions? Try http://unite.opera.com/applications/
Although I understand that people may not need to start an new email with Ctrl+E, I don’t see how that can be overwhelming to anyone since you need to setup an email account before the Mail panel is available. It makes sense when remembering that Thunderbird uses the layout engine in FF. No IRC account means no Chat panel. There’s nothing in the default UI that hints the possibility of writing emails from the browser, using IRC or handling torrents. All you see is the title bar, the address bar, the page and the status bar. Just like about all browsers. You don’t add the Mail panel, you won’t see it. And all panels, including bookmarks, use the same position on the screen. That’s clean. Which position you can toggle by striking F4 or clicking the close button on the panel bar.
I understand people being upset about having email, voice, irc, torrents, notes, streaming app, file sharing app, private IM app, private discussion forums, or whatever app is available on Unite instead of launching a browser, an email agent, and IRC client, a web server, etc. Using them is not mandatory and their presence does not impede your browsing experience. So what? It’s like saying Linux can do raytracing, blueprints, 3D design when all I want is watch movies and listen to music so I won’t use it (not speaking of Neolander here).
OK, fine. But what’s missing in Opera that makes it unfit for everyday use? I often hear the comment but never the justifications. For instance, the thing (besides saved sessions) I’ve loved the most about Opera in those 10 years is this: I’m typing a text on a forum page and hitting accidentally the back button will preserve the text when I hit ‘forward’. Which, in IE and Firefox, did clear the text! Thankfully, the same feature in now available in the FF 3.6.x currently installed on my Windows machine and it’s a recent addition.
The Opera guys even changed some shortcuts to match FF’s (view page source, open new tab, show download window, are the ones I can think of). I’ve changed some back to what they were. Can we change shortcuts in FF? I hope they won’t go the Apple way of choosing and setting what’s the best.
Opera is fine for me despite its 1%, 2% or 3% market share. What is it that it should do and doesn’t: allow deletion of individual items from the cache; apart from that, I don’t know. What is it that it should do better, I don’t know either. I can state what I would like in Firefox.
In the end, all browsers have a place, including IE (wow, hurts my fingertips to write that), it’s just a question of taste and suitability to each person. I guess that’s where diversity is a great thing!
Interesting. Didn’t try this one *exactly* because I thought that opera’s team only made such breakthrough changes in major releases.
Okay, now I understand better. I didn’t read the “combined” that way, but rather like “it’s the best at all three”.
That’s because the messy UI and settings hell are maybe the sole things which I hate with passion about Opera ^^ When I exclusively used it for 3 month in high school, I could get used to almost everything except for that.
The preference window is already quite bad (I noticeably remember the keybindings section where you couldn’t just click on the action and execute the keystroke with shivers), but I think that you’ve forgotten some. As an example, it always take me 4-5 attempts to find where the primitive ad blocker is in opera, and if I remember well it’s in none of those places…
Then things have changed a bit since last time I checked. By that time, there were dedicated menus for most of those features.
Now this is more of a philosophical debate, but is being hidden an excuse for software bloat, and is trying to put everything in one app which connects to the web a good security practice, provided that there’s 3 errors / 1000 LOC ?
I was going to say “it’s now in Firefox” before I rode the end of your comment ^^ You’re right that it’s a very nice feature which Opera introduced here, like tabbed browsing and address bar suggestions. I’ve been missing it from the day where I switched to Firefox 3 to the day when they finally implemented it.
Well… Opera lacks some sense of simplicity. When you open the browser for the first time, you first see an array of strange rectangles in the middle, instead of a blank page or some ready to use search engine. Then you look on top of the soft, and you get puzzled facing the large number of navigation buttons : why two previous/next buttons ? Why a magic wand ? Then you look to the left and notice some strange icons which you decide not to explore at the moment because it looks dangerous. Then you look at the bottom and see even more strange controls whose role is not obvious. Then you go back on top of the window and notice the high amount of menus and high use of screen space.
Oddly enough, Opera manages to lack completeness at the same time, on the most useful stuff. The bitorrent client is not configurable enough to reach nice dl/ul rates. You cannot easily add a new search engine when you visit a website like in Firefox (and in IE too if I remember well). The ad blocker more or less asks you to do anything by hand. And as someone said earlier, suggestions in the search bar lack some polish and adaptation to the user. Had some issues with the mail client back in my Opera days, too, but don’t remember them anymore.
I think that this paradox is reached because the devs try to do too much and hence go dispersed instead of focusing on just a few important things. Which goes back to the previous philosophical issue.
You see, that’s the beauty of having a good extension system with a great developer community ^^
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyconfig_extension
Of course it is ! As an example, if competitors weren’t here, I bet that Firefox would be today as slow as the 2.0 release which made me switch to Opera at the time ^^
Edited 2010-06-10 16:23 UTC
I laughed when I read this because… all of this is true and most of it has been changed.
I’m typing this on an old laptop that’s always on because I’m a tor node and I give computing power to BOINC. For some reason, it crashed and I had to delete my Opera profile. So I’m on a newly-installed like browser. All of your gripes above have been addressed. You don’t see the panel anymore, the rewind button has been removed, the menu is accessed via the red O button, etc. It’s like they had read what you’ve just written, but some months ago.
But not every icon has an obvious meaning, that’s why tooltips are useful. I just checked and there’s a “What’s Opera xxx” for each of Link, Unite and Turbo. So they listened to you. Scary.
What has not changed is the shortcut editing window. True, they should have made it like Eclipse’s key binding edition window, you see the command but you strike keys instead of writing “f4, control” as is still the case now in Opera.
Wow ! This looks very interesting, and quite new since the stable linux release of opera doesn’t seem to include this “red O button” which you mention.
*downloads a 10.60 snapshot to update his geeky knowledge*
EDIT : Second wow ! This is just a revolution compared with the Opera which I encountered some months ago. I just *love* that new interface ! Now this is just enough to make me use Opera again, provided that the rest follows
*has found a great geeky toy to play with, starts to stress-test it*
EDIT² : Support for those of us which don’t use Deb or RPM is much better too. No, really, unlike with opera 9 and 10.0, the opera dev team *really* managed to impress me this time ^^’
Edited 2010-06-10 19:51 UTC
End of the story : Well, being a development snapshot, this variant of Opera 10.60 still lacks Flash support at the moment, so it turns out not to be ready for my everyday browsing. Plus it makes many rendering mistakes and navigation can still feel slow in places, though better than Firefox 3.6. This will probably be fixed before final release.
However, it’s a very pleasant experience overall, and Opera seems to have improved in the areas which matter for me, instead of introducing the usual gadget overflow, so I might give RTM a try
Edited 2010-06-10 21:51 UTC
The thing I always have with Opera is that it is almost perfect but it is a little weird. What I don’t like in Opera’s bar:
1. it looks cluttered to me
2. no tags
3. no indication that the current page is bookmarked
4. no easy way to edit the bookmark of the current page
5. it fails to put the things I want at the top so I can get to them quickly
6. no good import from Firefox
7. I don’t understand how Opera learns or even if it does learn from me
What I really like in awesomebar:
1. it works great with the first character you type(g gives me 6 results:gmail,greader,ing bank,youtube,GRC,gcalendar) and each those sites is valuable for me
2. it looks clean by showing 6 results where history, tags and bookmarks are combined. A star or a tag shows if it is bookmarked or tagged.
3. bookmarking is easy by clicking the star and adding tags
4. I understand how it learns and how I can force it to learn more quickly
Just minute ago I tried to teach Opera to put tweakers.net and tweakers.net/pricewatch at the top when I type tw. Opera wants to seperate bookmarks and history. It wants to put search at the top. It is frustrating that I can’t get Opera to do what I want.
This sums up what’s wrong with non-Mozilla browsers in general. Power, control and correctness are what I want from a web browser (and in that order).
erm, but that’s /exactly/ what Opera offers:
* Power: it has more features than most browsers and have pioneered many of the common day features expected.
* Control: Opera is VERY customisable. Althoough I’ll be the first to admit that the configuration options are a nightmare if you’re unfamiliar with them. However, once you’ve set it up, it’s set up for life.
* Correctness: well Opera scored 100% on ACID3 before any other browser. Need I say more?
Each to their own though. Many people are happy with Firefox, and if they’re happy then there’s no real reason they should change.
Edited 2010-06-10 12:29 UTC
With regards to “Control” the person I was quoting had mentioned being unable to make Opera do what he wants. I’ve had similar experiences with Opera in the past. Maybe it’s possible, maybe not. That’s secondary. If I can’t get it configured the way I like, or if it takes massive effort, then I don’t have the control I want.
Power is highly debatable. Opera may have pioneered many things, which is true, but just having it doesn’t necessarily do the job. Opera did tabs, but the Mozilla tabbrowser extension made them work in a way that didn’t confuse people. I can’t say I’m entirely happy with Firefox in this area, either, as they’ve failed to advance much and had many regressions… but at least extensions can fix most of these problems.
Correctness is there almost as an afterthought to weed out false positives from browsers that just wont work. It’s listed last for a reason.
Well now you’re just dismissing Opera because you personally don’t like it.
Sure, if you don’t like it then there’s no reason why you should use it. And I don’t want anyone to feel like I’m not forcing them to use it or like it.
However, to say that it doesn’t have control or power because you personally don’t like the way how that control or power is presented to you is a little unfair.
It’s a bit like someone saying that a tank doesn’t have control or power because they’re used to driving a little hatchback with power steering or a bit like an FOSS advocate stating that Photoshop doesn’t have control nor power because it’s interface isn’t like GIMP.
So the simple fact is, Opera does have “control, power and correctness”, but you just don’t like the browser. And that’s ok. We all have preferences in software
Caution : This post includes pure OT
Implicitely stating that Gimp is to Photoshop what a hatchback is to a tank sounds a bit excessive to me. Except if you’re only comparing speed, of course =p
In my opinion, GIMP is to Photoshop what Linux is to Windows. Both when negative and positive aspects are concerned.
As an example, Windows has an awfully undiscoverable UI, a very good relationship with manufacturers which greatly improves hardware support, and requires high-end hardware to run smoothly.
Edited 2010-06-11 11:57 UTC
Power and control were clearly expressed in my example and it’s impossible to create a perfect analogy (as then it would be literal and not comparative) so quit your trolling.
The first example showed that you could make a clear and expressive analogy without trolling and was sufficient to express your opinion, hence it sounds safe to consider the second one as gratuitous trolling from *your* part. Because unlike the tank/hatchback analogy where pretty much everyone agrees, “Photoshop is ages above GIMP in terms of power and control” is very, very arguable (how many discussions on the subject are running on the internet at the moment ?) and should hence not be used in such a situation.
Edited 2010-06-11 12:04 UTC
Ok, fair point.
As much as I’m greatful for the power GIMP offers, it does feel like wrestling with a bear at times.
So I’d use Photoshop over GIMP anyday (had there been a Linux version of Photoshop that is). Thankfully I don’t need to do image editing often
If it can make you feel better, someone who learned image editing with gimp and one of the very few good GIMP book feels just as bad facing Photoshop’s interface, and Wine now manages to run CS2 if I remember well
In the end, the sole man who wins when wrestling with a bear is John West ^^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVS1UfCfxlU
Edited 2010-06-11 12:24 UTC
Opera is outdated, because it’s still closed source. SCNR!
No, seriously. Opera is a really nice browser and I have used it for a while. Open Source is a reason for me to use Firefox, but the main reason is that there are tons of Extension for it. I am not only talking about the stuff that a web browser should be able to do. There are also a lot of Extensions to make it usable for other stuff. Maybe one could compare it with Emacs and LISP. Firefox does the same with XUL, Javascript and a nice API.
While I don’t prefer Applications which are in fact FF-Extensions (not plugins, Java or Flash are plugins!) I really like it to have tons of easy-to-install packages.
If I wouldn’t use Firefox anymore I’d switch to Midori or Arora. They even have Adblock Plus built in and are cross-platform and Webkit based.
As I already said I prefer Open Source. However, if FF would be the reason the WWW isn’t developing anymore I’d switch. However, I can’t see this. The only blocking browser is (still) IE. Firefox supports all recommended standards that are in use somewhere and even enough of the in-development stuff. And there ARE things, which aren’t supported in Webkit or Opera, but work fine in Firefox. Acid-Tests are great, but they don’t cover everything!
As opposed to what? Chrome?
I’ve tried chrome a few times. Last time it went like this:
– Open chrome, go to slashdot
– Open some articles in tabs
– Notice that tabs open to the right of the current tab, not at the far right of all open tabs as god intended
– Look for the setting to change that
– There isn’t one?
– Close chrome.
This and many other things prevent me from using Google’s crappy browser. Being fast is nice, but fast is only part of what makes good.
“Notice that tabs open to the right of the current tab, not at the far right of all open tabs as god intended”
I find this behaviour way better (for my needs), it’s just more organized. Since Firefox implemented it as well (not using chrome/ium), I just can’t get back to the old way.
And Firefox is going to hell for this, I assure you (-;
Fortunately in Firefox when I encounter this problem I can (gasp!) change it back to correct behavior in a few clicks.
I don’t give a damn if the ‘new’ way is better. I’ve tried it. I don’t like it. I am never, ever changing and I will never use a browser that tries to make me.
Well, I tried firefox 64bit on windows, it went like this ..
1. Installed
2. double click icon to open
3. browser crashed.
4. uninstalled.
Besides, the x in the tab made much more sense then on the far right. It’s actually a usability improvement.
Who ever said anything about that?
Although in fact, since you brought it up, I do prefer it to be in a fixed location for all tabs and was disappointed when Firefox changed that. I want to have a predictable location at which to point and click, specifically so I can just sit there and click click click to keep closing tabs without having to readjust every 3 or so clicks because the position has slightly changed. So yeah it makes more sense, in theory, but it’s not more usable.
It doesn’t bother me, much, because 99% of the time I use CTRL+W, so it’s not a dealbreaker. If it were I’d have switched it back.
I’ve got a great cure for that … don’t run Windows.
Firefox 64-bit runs great on Linux 64-bit. Has done so for ages.
I dont want to downgrade. Why would I switch from an OS that just works to an OS that makes users want to commit suicide?
I spent 4 hours last night repairing an XP netbook that had come down with a case of Conficker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker
The Windows worm had infected every USB drive in the house, and it was rampant at the school where it came from. Difficult to counter? I’ll say.
Fortunately, I had to repair only the one netbook in my house, because the other two netbooks and the main desktop all run Kubuntu normally. Unfortunately, my son has to run Windows every now and then for his work, and so I ended up with the unpleaseant task of cleaning up his machine. Unlike installing Kubuntu, which takes no more than 20 minutes, to wipe and re-instate his Windows XP Home netbook took hours and hours. I still haven’t finished.
I shudder to think of the effort that must have been required by the IT staff at the school it came from … it must have taken many many man months of effort to get rid of Conficker infestation in the school environment. Maybe even more than a man-year. It would have cost many thounsands of dollars in wages.
So you think moving from Windows to Linux is a downgrade? On what planet?
Edited 2010-06-11 02:05 UTC
Earth .. its a nice planet. You should join us sometime
Just because someone was @#%#$’d up enough to get a virus on their computer does not make the OS bad. It was a bad user, computer 101, you should know that.
Now, lets get back on topic, eh?
Edited 2010-06-11 02:07 UTC
1. Seven million someones.
2. Conficker only infects Windows.
3. The netbook was sold with a vulnerable Windows XP Home only a year ago.
4. Inexperineced people should not be thought of as “bad users”, they are merely inexperienced. Not everyone is an IT guru, after all.
5. So why not simply use an OS that isn’t so broken as to be so vulnerable? Using Kubuntu on most of my home machines has no penalty (except for that one externally-mandated application my son must use for his work), and because it was in use on most of my household machines it saved me 3*6=18 hours of very, very boring work and heaps of download bandwidth. Everyone else in the house was very grateful that they had no downtime because of the great Conficker invasion**.
6. Yes, the OS was bad. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker
“It uses flaws in Windows software and Dictionary attacks on administrator passwords to co-opt machines.”
PS: ** The great Conficker invasion on planet earth.
Edited 2010-06-11 02:35 UTC
1. Not many at all … comparatively.
2. Well … lets see here .. KDE only targets Linux … there’s no point here
3. That doesn’t mean anything
4. Very good point.
5. Well, windows isn’t broken nor is it vulnerable when setup by someone with knowledge of the OS.
6. Yeah … ever been to kernel.org? Tons of flaws in linux too … No point here either …
This is only one of thousands upon thousands of viruses & worms that target Windows. Multiply 7 million by thousands and see what number you come up with. (Hint = over 7 billion).
Except that I had three users happily using KDE for their purposes, and only one who had a Conficker infection making his machine used for malicious purposes against him. Your choice, I suppose, but I know which one I’d rather have on my machine.
BTW … you can apparently get KDE for Windows … but the huge downside of that is, of course, that you would still be running Windows.
Yes it does. Conficker arose in 2008. The Windows netbook in question was sold to my son (who is not an IT guru), in a state vulnerable to Conficker infection, a year later. If Windows was worth the money, this should mean something. In my country, there are laws against being allowed to sell something that is not fit for purpose.
Of course.
It was vulnerable to a known threat when it was sold to my son, and the machine was set up by the OEM and the computer vendor whom one would hope should have knowledge of the OS they are selling.
It is not vulnerable to Conficker, nor to the many thousands and thousands of other threats against Windows systems out there in the wild today.
Edited 2010-06-11 02:52 UTC
Ever heard about that thing called modesty ?
Of course I have heard of it.
What has it got to do with me?
http://www.osnews.com/user/lemur2
http://intjcentral.com/manual3
Edited 2010-06-11 06:11 UTC
Well, one of the first things the Wikipedia article says is that the “I” means “introversion”. So I don’t think that it does apply to you
(However, I don’t believe in restricting mankind to a limited range of personality types myself, so this might influence my judgement…)
Edited 2010-06-11 08:09 UTC
From the wikipedia article:
– many INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals
– INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion “Does it work?” to everything
– produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake
– have a low tolerance for spin or rampant emotionalism
– are not generally susceptible to catchphrases
– do not recognize authority based on tradition, rank, or title
– are strong individualists who seek new angles or novel ways of looking at things
– are very determined people who trust their vision of the possibilities, regardless of what others think
– Hallmarks of the INTJ include independence of thought and a desire for efficiency
– harbor an innate desire to express themselves by conceptualizing their own intellectual designs
– have a talent for analyzing and formulating complex theories
– INTJs are generally well-suited for occupations within … engineering
– are often acutely aware of their own knowledge and abilities
Actually, it applies very well. When I did the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment with the company, I was rated as very “hard over” in all four categories. Interestingly, nearly all of the engineers within our company tested as being INTJ types, and everyone else, didn’t.
PS: There are no “right” answers when it come to MBTI assessment, it is merely an aid to figuring out what type of personality people have, and what they are suited for. Anyway, modesty is not a strong suit of mine, this is the message I am giving you.
Edited 2010-06-11 09:59 UTC
It depends on your point of view. Nowadays, it’s when I turn on my father’s windows box that I want to commit suicide.
-It takes 2-3 min to turn on and run an application. Even when it’s finally somewhat responsive, it remains horribly slow (and got the “slow PC” nickname because of this). About as fast as an average LiveCD. And that’s after heavily cleaning it up, then putting a fresh install of windows on it after having observed that the cleanup method didn’t work. I just HATE that unusable desktop which is displayed for 1 min 30 before actually being up to something useful, who came up with that idea in the first place ?
-Wi-Fi connection works approximately 4 times out of 5, no clue why but it regularly just won’t connect and work without deactivating and reactivating the card in the Control Panel first. It sometimes require 2 or 3 reactivations to get it working. No clue why this happens, I’ve always believed that computer networks were sent from hell to make us miserable but on my Linux box it just always works. Link quality is almost certainly not to blame since we bought some external antenna to improve it and now web surfing works perfectly well… when it works
-Pop-ups from various sources make me mad. Especially when the Wi-Fi is broken again : if I don’t bother to fix it because I just want to print or scan something, I’ll then get endless amounts of “New networks are available !” and “Connected to <ESSID>, Link connectivity : Very Low”. That is, when Java, Flash, and Avast don’t show up looking for a fight…
-The only thing which manages to make me smile on this PC is when, once in a while, I get a blue screen because of a buggy Nvidia driver. Crappy graphics drivers are one of the sole true multiplatform aspects of desktop computing…
-Who at Microsoft came up with the idea that the soft used to kill the various buggy programs should be stuffed with crap until it takes a minute to load when the system is under load (which is generally the case for the kinds of crashes where you need them) ?
-And then, there’s the “bozo the clown” theming. No, seriously, how old is the targeted population of Microsoft ?
However, I’ve observed that Linux has a bad effect on my health, too, even if leading to suicide is certainly not part of it. Anytime I finally manage to make it work, after trying endless amounts of buggy distros, I may use it for a few months, but I always end up voluntarily installing beta software or a new distro aside with the current one just for the sake of fun and trying new stuff. This is a behavior which looks common in the Linux world, so I wonder if a prolonged exposure to Linux does not cause masochism…
(Disclaimer : Yes, my father, my mother, and my girlfriend own a Mac. I hate it too. In fact, it occurs that as much as I like computer science, the sole operating systems which I tried for a long time and still have some difficulties to rant about are Symbian and s40 from Nokia. They just happen to work, with only a minor crash or buggy behavior from time to time…)
Edited 2010-06-11 05:05 UTC
If nothing else, here is one possibility:
http://www.thevarguy.com/2010/06/10/memo-from-dell-ubuntu-linux-is-…
The word is getting out, slowly but surely.
I’d LOVE to see this backported to FF 3.6.
What don’t you like about 3.7?
The fact it’s not released yet and still months away. Pushing WebM to existing users on 3.6 would be a nice boost to WebM, but I’d rather they ship it in a major update where there’s less chance of breakage.
http://www.slideshare.net/beltzner/firefox-roadmap-2010-0510?from=s…
Mozilla devs have made quite a tempting feature set for FF 4. Let’s see if they can respect it now. I, for one, am almost sure that it won’t be released before 2011
By the way, this will centralize all information about the future of Firefox and what hapened to 3.7, for those who wonder…
Edited 2010-06-10 14:00 UTC
Back to at least something related to the topic: Firefox 3.6.4 is due out very soon.
http://www.techdrivein.com/2010/06/firefox-364-on-verge-of-its-fina…
However, it is crash protection only that is shipping in Firefox 3.6.4. No WebM as yet, even though WebM is now in Mozilla nightly builds.
No WebM, no Jagermonkey, and no 98% on acid3 tests such as the current Firefox 3.7 nightly build achieves either. Still, crash protection is a worthwhile feature, for the price of a download.
“changes to your build configuration, unless you’re building on Win32, where you’ll need to have MASM installed in order to compile libvpx’s optimized assembly.”
I think FF on win32 needs Visual Studio to compile. Isn’t masm included? I dream of the day FF will compile with mingw and open source libs on windows ONLY.
Good news.
TO all Opera fans, I want to say that on Linux with newest gstreamer libs (i.e. Debian unstable), one can pla webm content without problem in Opera 10.6x snapshots! It just works.
Maybe there is some need make it even better (like faster seeking), but it works, and i use it already without problem, in 10.60.