Evaluating Firefox 3 Beta 5

After upgrading to Ubuntu8 Hardy, I have been using the new beta release of Firefox, which ships automatically with the OS upgrade. It has a whole bunch of new features, some of which are very useful, and I thought I’d give my thoughts here.

The documentation says that there is a new rendering engine, which frankly I am not technical enough to understand properly, but in terms of user experience, the site also claims that Firefox now has

Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.

Which has been extremely useful. due to ongoing driver/resolution/graphics issues, the web has been a pain to use at times on this PC. But with the scalable full page zoom, it almost doesn’t matter any more. It works far better than in Opera or IE as I remember it. With the new zoom feature, text no longer runs way outside of what the designer obviously intended, and images are now viewable. I can now see who that person in the thumbnail picture on facebook is. And the fact that I no longer have to increase the size immediately on entering a site/tab because it is stored for me, improves use considerably.

The next very sensible change is the

Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.

It always bothered me that when I logged in to a site where I was unsure exactly what password I had used, that Firefox would only ask me if I wanted to remember it before I knew that I’d gotten the password right. It also now drops down at the top of the page rather than as a dialog, which makes it far easier to ignore - if you don’t want to remember the password, you don’t have to click anything, and it doesn’t force itself upon your browsing experience. Which is far, far better.

Possibly the most interesting change (to me) as something that they’ve improved without my ever having noticed it was broken is

Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for. Results are returned according to their frecency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that you’re seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!

This works very well. Adaptive algorithms that tune to my habits? Generally something to be sceptical about. But this one actually does seem to work. Firstly the dropdown from the address bar is larger, each entry is about 2.5 times the size what it was, features a favicon if it can retrieve one, and lets you see far easier. Secondly, it works on parts of urls, not just scans from the beginning. You can type the name of the .html file, or a part of the directory, or partial words that are included in the address. And it actually does seem to bring up the most recent and most regular in the list for pretty much everything I’ve wanted to autocomplete. This is probably the one feature that I would really miss should I change browser. (Apart from the page zoom, which is useful to me but only because it fixes issues that firefox shouldn’t really have to.)

Only two other things that have been useful to me, but not so I’d shout about them, but they are the ability to Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit. Which I can see being useful for some people, although I’ve just disabled it, and also the Text selection improvements: multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; double-click drag selects in “word-by-word” mode; triple-clicking selects a paragraph. Although I’ve not used it much more than to check that it works, I can remember wanting to do this and being irritated in times past. Good to know that you could.

On the other hand…

It is a beta release. It crashes. Quite a lot. It has all kinds of problems with Google services that you have to log in to. More specifically, logging out of them. Leaving Gmail crashes it consistently as in pretty much 95% of occasions I log out. Google Reader on occasion (without any particular rhyme or reason as far as I can see, I have read somewhere that it’s more to do with processes running elsewhere that causes this to happen rather than an internal Firefox problem per se, but I haven’t a clue what it is that I’m running that does so.) Analytics and Webmaster Tools have been almost always fine, Facebook crashes on logout every now & then, but Gmail is the real killer.

So….

All said, I completely understand why they decided to ship it as the default browser for Hardy. The improvements are genuine improvements, and have made the browser better. Having to use Opera to access Gmail is a pain. (More so for me probably because of above issues about this PC) If they fix this in the final release, which I’m sure they will, it looks like a very good one. It’s enough of a better browser that I haven’t uninstalled it to revert back, or installed the previous version to run alongside it.

Configuring Apache for clean URLs on Ubuntu

Have just finished making the relevant changes to Apache so that Drupal can generate clean URLs. Didn’t find anything anywhere that contained everything needed and worked for me, so here is what did work:

Check to see if the rewrite_module is enabled:

apache2ctl -M

Which generates a list of the modules. If rewrite isn’t there, enable it:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

I then changed the permission for rewrite in the apache sites-available file. Which was located at /etc/www/apache2/sites-available/default

In that file, I inserted the following:

<Directory /var/www/drupal>

AllowOverride All

</directory>

Where /var/www/drupal is the location of the folder containing my drupal installation, and within which all drupal sites will be stored.

Then restart apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I then logged in to the drupal site as the administrator and navigated to Administer => Site Configuration => Clean URLs and enabled the option.

After which the url rewriting worked.

This worked for my setup which was Ubuntu 7.10, Apache 2.2.4, PHP 5.2.3-1ubuntu6 Drupal 6.2

Progress>Hegel?

This week has been an interesting one, full of nice little discoveries that make things ever-so-slightly better.

Firstly I’ve been getting to grips with the Gnome-terminal and using it a lot more. The really useful thing has been the ability to open files in programs while granting them temporary superuser privileges. Which I learnt how to do this week:

sudo bluefish /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Not only that, but I’ve simply been using it a lot more to do everything, and making sure to look up commands that i don’t understand when I read them in howto guides on the net. Slowly, the point of doing things this way becomes clear. Certainly for playing with things on the Apache server I’ve got running on the PC it’s very useful.

Meanwhile I’ve installed Drupal to play about with it. The instant power of the bundled modules is apparent right from the start, but I suspect that there is quite a lot to learn with regards to getting right down into editing both the themes and the back-of-house that would have to be done to get it to be actually useful. Until then, it’s simply quite ugly.

This week’s other development was to begin learning python. Which is going relatively well, although thinking in it is still a long way off, I’m at least now able to read it and understand what’s going on. More to follow I suspect.

The sound of keyboards

After half an hour of intense stupidity I eventually got the jMP3 plugin working properly without having bulky embed object code at every line, which was nice. Turns out that yes, it works exactly like it says on the instructions page, but I was forgetting to change the # to . to attribute the player to a class rather than a div. Never mind, at least now I know.

What has been changing the way I use the internet is discovering all the keyboard shortcuts for Firefox. It started with me trying to fix the backspace button so that I could go to the previous page rather than scroll up through anchors. This seems to be an issue with Ubuntu, and is fixed by going to about:config, and then changing the browser.backspace_action value to 0. I learned this from a blog somewhere that I’ve forgotten, I’ll edit a link here when I find it.

This then led me to search for a way to jump to the URL bar using the keyboard, which is something that I’ve always wanted to do but didn’t know how. That led me to this article which has all sorts of useful keyboard shortcuts for Firefox.

Which has somewhat changed my browsing experience. I now use these all the time:

alt+d - jump to url bar
‘(string) - to find link text on a page
ctrl+g - jump to the next instance of find
ctrl+enter - open link in new tab
ctrl+shift+enter - open link in new tab and give focus
alt+left - back button
alt+right - forwards button
ctrl+w - close current tab

In conjunction with the Gnome desktop shortcuts:

alt+ctrl+arrowkey - switch workspace
alt+f2 - open application..
alt+f1 - applications menu.
alt+f9 - minimise window
alt+f10 - maximise window
ctrl+alt+shift+arrow - move current window to different workspace

I now rarely use the mouse at all. Which possibly makes things quicker, but certainly means that I don’t have to keep raising my arm. After all, wasn’t doing everything by typing the point of Linux?

Slow Nudges to the Midriff of Style

A busy week in terms of developing. The site went through a complete redesign which lightened the whole thing and began to make it look halfway decently designed. Only half, but still, an improvement.

Having looked around for a solution to creating rounded corners, I eventually settled on this method largely because it gives me the ability to not bother creating any background graphics. There seem to be three million rounded corners methods out there, none of them that I’ve found to be particularly satisfying.

What has been particularly useful is Walter Zorn’s jQuery based tooltip which has very well annotated script, is very easy to customize and lightweight. Which has been very useful for displaying album titles above thumbnails of covers on Something Else

Meanwhile we went live with streaming audio using Sean O’s jMP3 which is a very nice slim flash music player. As ever, function beat down style for the minute, and the thing works, but I’m embedding the player again and again, which I don’t think is actually needed.

The other big discovery was Bluefish - a web focused text editor with a whole bunch of very useful features for writing code. It’s very quick, very nice, very clean, and has all of the features I was wanting from the Ubuntu standard text editor: a directory tree in the same program for switching files, working keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs, decent find & replace functionality.

What’s more, it also contains a built in syntax library for CSS2, HTML, Python and PHP, which is just a brilliant feature to have displayed in a side panel next to your file.

Next up, sorting out the jMP3 code, tweaking the graphics, and perhaps actually releasing a record!

Post Ubuntu - Humanity Towards Machines

I’ve just this week switched to work completely in Ubuntu7 from XP, which has had all sorts of knock-on effects all over the place. So far, a mixed bag, at least until I iron out what I assume will be creases that allow themselves to be ironed. That’s the whole linux thing right? You don’t like it, change it.

The good things though, are great. Workspaces are a revelation, allows you to navigate those times when you have eight windows open, four of them with multiple tabs themselves. It’s the first time I’ve done anything more than just play about with them for the novelty factor, and already I growl at the Windows PCs at work for being so desperately backwards.

The availability, ease of access and so-far the quality of the software available is also brilliant. Want some software? ten minutes, fully operational, free, and not something that you’ll get to know only to find that the triall has disabled save and export.

Have been playing with Ardour http://ardour.org/ a digital audio workstation, which looks like it could offer all kinds of possibilities that I am yet to properly explore. Lovely to have that software naivety featuring in creative processes again though.

The other big difference is in having a sensible text editor to play with after spending the last few weeks hand-coding with notepad in xp. Automatic recognition of css js and html syntax and automatic coloration is a godsend as is tabbed editing. Dramatically cuts down on open windows and is simply a very good idea.

On the negative side, it does seem to have broken the web. If this is what the IE development people are struggling to avoid, then I have at last some sympathy. Having used firefox on xp, it’s never really been an issue, but the first forays into the outside world using ubuntu were rather painful. The main issue was lack of fonts - what with the web being built on verdana arial and times, but that was relatively easily rectifiable.

The larger, and as of now unresolved issue lies somewhere around the screen resolution, which insists on rendering pages with incredibly small font size. Which in turn means that yuo have to adjust up to beyond normally reasonable levels to read anything, which, on most sites means that design goes mostly out of the window. Any time images get heavily involved the results are horrible. An experience to use as a lesson perhaps. Also there seem to be only two resolutions available by default, one far too high, the other far too low. There must be a way to solve this. The next challenge.

Overall though, brilliant and free.

Wishful Thinking

Spent a lot of time over the last few days looking into open source cms solutions. Frankly it looks like Drupal, Zope or Joomla. Even more frankly it looks like as much as I have the desire to get familiar with at least one of these (probably Joomla as of the moment) I have absolutely no need for it with the Something Else site, and so it’s not worth taking up the hard-drive of this (awful) pc or the hosting server. Something to look into as and when I start on the next site. Ditto php for the above.

What has been very useful though, is jQuery, which is a free java-script framework that I only got around to downloading this evening, but is already clearly about to be very useful, If only for being quietly exciting. The possibilities are clearly endless, and you can quite see why it’s popular.

Google analytics started returning results earlier, which is the first time I’ve had it do so to a live site rather than a test beta, lots of incredibly brief visits from Germany. Which is nice. I expect entirely artificial though. Still, it’s nice to know that someone/thing other than me is looking.

Managed to solve the background-color problems with the a:hover, which were due to what, in retrospect were obvious mistakes in the cascading of the css. The current solution is still relatively ugly, and the ability to set different a:hover css properties to text or image links without using what are frankly needless divs would be nice. As would a way to use text pop-ups for image links, although I suspect that the problems with this are a lot more to do with the intrinsic ugliness of the current solution to the above problem than any specific fault. As of right now, it works. Just. I may use a per-tem java-script solution for a) functionality and b) adding jQuery in a useful setting.

5am Grinding

So the Something Else site is now up and running and has had a relatively minor, but still useful redesign. Clook worked very quickly to register the domain and set me up with their online control panel etc.

Unfortunately this is a slightly awkward web app with some design decisions that you might have to question. Whether anyone would want to rename files quite as often as they sem to think is necessary is highly debateable. It does work though, while documentation could be a lot better. Working is one thing, working well is quite another. Filezilla has changed a lot and removed many of my gripes about their system. If you were having to do it through a browser for some reason it would become extremely irritating.

Big Time in the Jungle

So the plan to learn ruby has sort of gone by the wayside. One of the major problems is that I have no specific problem that I need to solve using RoR. Which makes the learning a very abstract process.  In the course of flicking through part of a bunch of tutorials though, I have begun to see the possibilities of what you could possibly do with the thing. Although have not actually managed to install properly. The install instructions are all either horribly vague or are assuming a level of technical competence that is frankly beyond me.

Facebook continues to plague my email inbox with alerts including those from people I have absolutely no desire to think about. Which is nice. Just about beginning to see the attraction. Although still in quite a dubious, gruff sort of way.

NewsGator on the other hand, looks to be very, very useful. All sorts of useful little extras, the ability to email the contents of a feed to any email address using a pop-up box rather than transferring the link to an email client is very useful, although it does require you to remember email addresses, and will cut down on ‘replyability’. Still very nice for just firing off the odd link.

Basecamp meanwhile looks to be a fantastically useful program, and if only I had any collaborators, would be even more useful. In any case, using it to manage the label will be a useful exercise methinks.

ma.gnolia seems to be a very good bookmarking site although it does somewhat seem to go very very slow a lot of the time, and also to crash firefox when I have more than one tab open. However already it seems to be full of relatively  reasonable/interesting people, and the best quality links I’ve found in the last week have all come from here. In comparison Digg looks like complete banality.

Death & Discovery

A brand new blog for a whole new world. Talking about all things webwards.