Tag Archives: Firefox

Browsers found to be made from china

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A suspicion has arisen that all standard browsers are made of china*. Bone china. I.e. as fragile as Wedgwood tea service.

The evidence is that it seems impossible to click on any given link without one browser or another falling over.

Each browser self-destructs in its own way. Each has its own list of unfavourites, with its own set of rules about the sticking point at which it will no longer follow a hyperlink.

I must have misunderstood Tim Berners-Lee’s original scheme, but I had the idea that displaying pages and following hyperlinks to open URLs were the whole points of a browser. I don’t care what else they can do. Using Netscape 0.0001 (or something like that) on dial-up would be more effective than using FF (latest update), IE (I admit to still having IE6), Chrome and Opera.

FF swallows memory as if it is running the space shuttle on the side. Ok, I had a few plugins but I’ve disabled them all and it’s actually got markedly touchier rather than more accommodating. It will die instantly if it doesn’t like a page. It makes sure it takes every open tab with it. At its most petulant, it takes the whole operating system. It then offers to reopen the tabs when you try to restart it. Naturally, it tries to open the murderous tab and dies again.

IE6 doesn’t top itself as readily but it can barely display any sites without spilling the main content down to its own new div at the bottom of the page. It has a highly developed aesthetic sense and often decides that some stylesheets are just too ugly, so it just won’t use them. It has serious attachment issues – it will often refuse to release memory, no matter how impeccable the shut down process has been.

Installing Chrome was shooting myself in the foot, in browser format. I stupidly let it nominate itself as default. That means, any link I click on opens Chrome. I don’t like its hairtrigger nature. A millisecond pause as the mouse passes over a hyperlink and its opened the page. I don’t like the open and close tabs buttons. I have yet to close a tab without accidentally opening half a dozen tabs each offering a “Most visited” that shows mini screenshots of sites that I have visited once – by accident (ref: the hair trigger bit, above) and which come back to haunt me forever.

Opera is the Gap browser (reference to Piers Anthony.) I forget its existence until I’ve already got frustrated enough to do impromptu impressions of someone with a terminal case of Tourette’s. (Terminal, geddit… Sorry) Then I have no passwords stored anywhere so I can’t actually get into anything I have any login privileges to. So I might as well not bother.

These browsers are studded with so many updates, extra features and dial-home-devices that I am seemingly operating an unpaid outpost of Mozilla, Google and Microsoft. And running the space shuttle.

Right, browsers, pay attention. I’ve had it up to here with you. Just open links when i click on them. Is that too much to ask?

*(That’s made “of” china, not made “in” China. I wasn’t suggesting that browsers might be forged or contaminated with melamine.)

Pic-lens FF plug-in

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Pic Lens is an amazing plug-in for Firefox.

I hate Firefox plug-ins in general. Mostly they just make Firefox even more of a memory hog and add irritating toolbars, without providing extra functions you might actually want.

Pic Lens is just brilliant, though, if you browse pictures often. This is a screen shot of it in operation – it’s a Flickr page with an image selected.

pic lens screen shot

It takes seconds to download and install this. As soon as you’ve restarted Firefox, you can go to any standard source of images (such as Flickr) and there’s a small red arrow in the bottom right of each image. Just click on the arrow and you are in a virtual gallery, with images shown 3 high along the walls. See the screen shot of the result of a search on Google images:

Screen shot of Google images

You just scroll around until you find what you want, zooming in and out and along the gallery by mouse actions. Click on an image to see it larger. (Admittedly, you have to go out to a normal view to find the URL or to comment, as far as I can see so far. I might just be too inexpert.)

It’s intuitive to use, once you stop looking irritatedly for a menu. You can work out the elegantly designed controls by trial and error if you’ve ever used a PC in the past decade. The screen looks beautiful. Images look much better on a black background with all the normal irritating screen bits and pieces.

But incredibly, it’s also really fast. It’s much faster than moving around Google or Flickr under your own steam.

I’ve only found three major drawbacks so far. As I already said, it doesn’t take you straight to the context URL, so you can’t find a website or comment on Flickr pictures from inside it. You have to close it to do anything else – which is difficult because the other drawback is that you can just get sucked into looking at thousands of images and always want to see just one more.

It is brilliant.

Firefox and Gmail

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FirefoxAre there any other Firefox users who have Gmail (Google Mail) accounts? If so, please put me out of my misery. Does your copy of firefox crash every single time you try and do something with your mailbox?

I am using Firefox 2.0.0.14, which as far as I can tell is the most up to date version. I have tried updating it and I have tried updating various other components on my computer. All to no avail.

Without fail, every time I go into Gmail the countdown to a crash begins. I can view all manner of other pages, have twenty tabs open and be downloading huge files. All fine. Try to click on a folder in Gmail and it is game over. I have sort of narrowed it down to something in the scripts on Gmail causing the crash but I am not totally sure (yet).

Recent examples: I tried to create a new filter… crash. I tried to view all starred mail… crash. I tried to view all emails with a given tag… crash. I tried to send an email… crash.

The only saving grace is I can read emails and, despite FF crashing on me it actually manages to send the emails. It is, in a nutshell, a nightmare. Fortunately Internet Explorer is perfectly functional with Gmail, but this makes it all the more annoying. During a given day, I wouldn’t have any reason to open IE if it wasn’t for bloody Gmail.

As far as I can tell, this is recent. I cant remember when it began but it must be less than a month ago.

Is it just my computer? Am I alone with this madness? Do Firefox developers get to see the 30 – 40 error messages my machine sends out each day?

Bodiam Castle? Google Is Your Friend…

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I have been looking through the website logs to see just what it is that drives people to this site and, while lacking in raw comedy value (unlike some), it has been interesting.

Running a combination of Firestats, Feedburner and Google Analytics it seems this blog is getting around 400 visits a day. From these around 80% are new (which shows just what a non-loyal readership we hold…) and of those around 70% come here from a search engine – nearly all from Google. For the numbers-fans, this translates to about 200 hits a day from Google searches. Given the insanely varied nature of topics here, you would be excused for thinking this was reflected in the search stats. Not so.

Of the top ten search terms used to come here, seven are image searches, and this accounts for about 90 of the incoming hits. Even stranger, of these over a third are all searching for images of Bodiam Castle.

Now, Bodiam Castle is a gorgeous, fourteenth century fairytale castle in East Sussex, run by the National Trust, so I can understand why people are interested in it. In fact, I understand this well enough to have uploaded another photo!

Bodiam CastleIf you have come here searching for Bodiam Castle, I hope you like this, and you can even see more on Flickr. It has been a long time since I have been to Bodiam so please, forgive me for the photos being out of date now. If you have links to other pictures of this gorgeous castle, please let me know and I will be more than happy to link to them from here.

Back onto the search topic, there is the determination issue to consider now. Will my posting of a new Bodiam article increase the amount of hits I get for this? Are people massively disappointed when the Mighty Google sends them here rather than elsewhere? Why dont people use Yahoo to search for Bodiam?

The other common terms people use for an “images search” are:

  • Schwarzenegger
  • Nice Art
  • Fine Houses
  • Holy Wafer
  • Jesus Toast (around 5 people a day come here using that search term… MADNESS)
  • Future Castles

Now, some make more sense than others, but I can only guess at the disappointment people must feel when their searches lead them here.For completeness, the most common search terms that bring people to this site are:

  • HDR How To (use Photomatix)
  • Cool Viking Names (well all of them)
  • Bad Journalist (again, all of them)
  • Firefox Memory Hog (it is)
  • Pipex Download Speeds (almost non-existent)
  • McCanns Blog (wrong place, I didn’t even know they had one)

One last point, a bit of an oddity is a search term Feedburner has identified leading some poor unfortunate here: “blog: I cannot read, feel distracted” – I have no idea what this blog has to offer this poor person.

Firefox Memory Hog

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Now, for almost as long as I can remember (yes, I have a short memory), I have been a big fan of Firefox. I work on web applications so I have quite a few browsers installed, but generally I stick to Firefox for most browsing, with IE as a “backup” for those odd little sites which are cabbaged in other browsers. Opera is installed, but it doesn’t get used as often as the “big two” and the Seamonkey / Mozila etc browsers are hardly touched (anyone use Amaya for browsing?).

Recently, Firefox informed me that it had been updated and needed a restart. I dutifully complied and everything seemed to run fine.

As the hours and days passed, I noticed that my system was becoming slower and slower – web pages were taking an eternity to open and when I was running Photoshop or other system intensive applications everything really was starting to slow down. For reference, my system is an Athlon 64 x2 3800+ (Dual processor) with 1gb of ram. You would hope, that it would be fast at web browsing and basic office applications. It was, until recently…

Some initial research revealed that crap-shop-crap-ISP Pipex was providing me with a fraction of the broadband service they claimed, which explains the slow web pages (somewhat), but the problem remains in locally hosted pages. Despite my disgust with Pipex, they can’t really be blamed for everything else slowing down either.

Eventually, I cracked and bothered myself to look into this. Opening task manager reveals a possible cause of the problems. Firefox is a massive memory hog. I mean massive.

An example I had Firefox open with nothing other than this blog displayed. IE was running with this blog, Flickr, eBay and gmail tabs open.

Firefox was using 164mb of RAM vs IE which was using 98mb. IE had more tabs open and the tabs had more data-heavy pages.

What on Earth has the world come to. I tried opera with the blog page and flickr open and it hardly registered a byte. Blimey.

It seems that firefox, at least with this current “Upgrade” has become a worse memory hog than IE. Opera is like lightning in comparison to Firefox, but it always has been – seeing IE more responsive and less memory intensive is pretty shocking. I am going to look into this a bit more, but I would be interesting in hearing any other experiences on this subject.

[tags]Firefox, Mozilla,Internet Explorer, Opera, IE, Technology, Web Browsers, RAM, Memory, System Resources, Computers, Computing, Software, Problems, IT, Upgrade, Pipex, ISP, Amaya, Internet[/tags]