A little while back I wrote how I was getting annoyed by Firefox more and more. So last weekend I talked some computer stuff with some friends and I mentioned the “Firefox eats my RAM”-problem. I one of my friends told me the old story of how this was a feature.I explained it was a bug, because with no tabs open, so no need to conserve history, it still ate a lot of memory.
Today I was viewing a lot of photos and Firefox and ofcourse this used up a lot of RAM. So I closed all the tabs, but still the RAM is lost. And now I made a screenshot of it:
Now some people may argue that it’s virtual memory or something. But I checked with Process Explorer. And it’s around 200MB of private bytes and a working set of 210MB. No tabs open or anything. How is this a feature?
[Last played: Rage Against The Machine - Settle for nothing]
Last night I implemented favicon icons in Feed Vortex. I’d seen this in FeedDemon and I really liked it. Instead of the icons I designed for Feed Vortex (which are pretty ugly), you can see the icons the site a feed belongs to uses. This adds some color and some familiarity to the feed list in Feed Vortex.
But downloading the icons is harder then you might expect. I expected to just get the favicon.ico at the root of the site and be done with it. Boy was I wrong.
One thing that I ran into was that some sites didn’t have a favicon.ico at their root, but at some other location. They tell the browser this by adding a
tag to the page. Fair enough. Maybe I’ll figure out a way around this, but this seems like a correct way to have the favicon at another position.
But then there are sites like www.apple.com that are simply misconfigured. Sure, apple.com has a favicon.ico at the right place. But they serve it as “text/plain”. In other words, I ask for the icon file and apple.com says: “Sure, here is the file. By the way, it’s just a text file.” But it isn’t. It’s a valid icon file…..well, semi-valid, but I’ll get to that later.
There are also sites like the mono-project.com website. They don’t have a favicon.ico, but instead of returning a “404 -page not found” error. They send a “304 page moved” HTTP code and then serve a normal webpage with the “200 Everything is A-okay” HTTP code. So Feed Vortex never knows there is no icon, it just doesn’t understand the data. It expects an image file, but gets an HTML file. I must admit that my website is also guilty of this and I need to fix this ASAP. But this is apparently the default configuration my webhost uses.
And then there are the semi-valid icon files. Sometimes a website serves an icon file and Firefox sees and understands it. Internet Explorer sees and understands it. Hell, even Windows explorer can read it, but the .NET Bitmap class can’t and tells me it’s invalid data. Livejournal.com has such an icon.
All in all this wasn’t the simple ordeal I thought it would be, but most of my feeds now have nice icons and I’ll figure out a way to deal with the others in time.
You’ve probably seen it before sometimes. You install an application and it’s Installshield installer requires(!!) you to fill in a company name. I just had it again with the demo of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It’s a game for crying out loud! Why the hell do I need to fill in a company name?
It’s a case of laziness. From what I know of the games industry, and this can be wildly inaccurate, the developer sends to files to the production company and they put it in an installer. They just take the default wizard and slap on a custom background or two and they’re done.
So effectively the game developer may have created the perfect game, but because of the lazy production company (the EAs of this world) the Out Of The Box experience you get starts off pretty bad. I’m sure many people have called the support desk to ask why the “next” button is grayed out. And then the support desk needs to explain that you need to fill in the “Company name” box, even though you are just a normal user who bought the game for fun and not for corperate use.
Update
To make things even worse. After filling in a dot (”.”) as a company name and pressing”next”. I’m at the “Select install destination” page. I always install games and applications on my D: drive, so I click “browse” and select a directory on the D: drive. I click okay and the page tells me that the game requires “0k” of space on the destination drive. Weird….so I click “Next”. And I’m presented with the same page, only this time with the space requirement filled in.
I hate lazy programmers.
[Now playing: Spineshank - Slavery]
I don’t want to bash Apple, but I don’t get the hype. They’re just as bad with software as Microsoft is. In fact, I’d say Apple is worse on marketing, because they continue to bash on Microsoft. Just look at this post by Robert McLaws and the accompanying pictures. It says it all. Apple can only get attention by bashing the big boy.
At this conference they revealed 10 awesome new features for their next version of Os X. Paul Thurrott has a nice overview of those ‘features’.
And while Apple bashes Microsoft and Windows Vista, Quicktime 7 is still crashing on my computer, just like it has for the last few months. Half the time when I open a HD trailer I get the all-too familiar “select your debugger” screen. And yesterday I tried installing Quicktime 7 on my PC at work, only to have it fail at the final step in the installer. Some vague error about a function in a DLL. I did have a Quicktime Player icon on my desktop, but it couldn’t be started. In fact, the uninstaller also couldn’t be started. It also crashed. After a reboot the Quicktime quickstarter did start (why do they even install that shit? I don’t want it!), but selecting any option from it resulted in a crash.
I did some Googling and read that my best bet was to install an older version of Quicktime, uninstall that, then reinstall Quicktime 7. That fixed it for a lot of people. But not for me. I couldn’t even install the older version, it complained Quicktime was already installed, but I couldn’t uninstall it. So to regedit I went and spend a good 10 minutes deleting all sorts of Quicktime references. After that I could install Quicktime 6, but it also crashes……figures.
In the end I just downloaded and installed the Quicktime Alternative. It works perfectly.
Allright, so I talked about my growing problems with FireFox recently. So now I was at the biggest webpage on the internet and found a hidden Firefox advertisement in there. The webpage says you should use Firefox, because: “It offers improved speed, security, and simplicity. It’s tabs feature alone makes it worth switching. It’s free.”
Okay, let me give my opinion about that:
Internet Explorer starts about 3 times as fast as Firefox and in a recent test where someone tested the Javascript speeds of Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, they found that Firefox was the slowest! Opera was the fastest by far, even twice as fast as Internet Explorer (number two) on most tests.
It’s true that Internet Explorer has had more security leaks then Firefox, but Firefox has them as well. And Firefox isn’t used nearly as long and nearly as much as Internet Explorer. It’s the same argument you hear from Apple fans: “Mac is more secure”. No it isn’t. It’s just that the bad guys aren’t interested in investing time on a system that about 1% of the computer users use, when they can attack a system that over 90% of the users use. Internet Explorer has way more marketshare and is therefore a more economical target for crackers. As Firefox gains more marketshare this will change and then we’ll see if it’s secure. It is absolutely true that Firefox responds more quickly to security problems then Microsoft. This is because Internet Explorer is so entangled in Windows and all kinds of applications and it’s available in a gazillion languages. So testing and making sure a security fix doesn’t break someone’s program are very difficult. Because if the fix breaks someone’s program then that’s probably because “Microsoft really wanted to break the program” (just read some of Raymond Chen’s articles and you’ll know that Microsoft takes compatibility very seriously). Ofcourse as an enduser I don’t really care. My browser is vulnerable, so it needs to be fixed, fast. Just keep the economics in mind. A very important thing that most people ignore.
Why is Firefox more simple then Internet Explorer? I think their equally simple. Ofcourse, I’m, no average Joe when it comes to computers, so maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t see any fundamental differences in the two browsers from a usage perspective.
Tabs? Internet Explorer 7 has tabs. And Internet Explorer 6 with the MSN toolbar has tabs. Maxthon has tabs. Avant browser has tabs. Opera has tabs. In fact, I think Opera was the first browser ever to have tabs.
Internet Explorer is free. So are Maxthon, Avant browser and Opera.
I just see a bunch of bullshit arguments.
Extreme Tech has done a browser comparison between Firefox 2.0 beta 1, Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 and Opera 9.0. They have a nice table showing the differences between the browsers. Have a look.
Update:
WildEnte informed that Opera is also free. I hadn’t checked out Opera for a few years, so I was still under the impression it wasn’t.
