Skip to main content

Why Firefox 3.1 can wait

The FOSS community is rejoicing another release of FF - 3.1beta. Mozilla released FF3.1beta on tuesday. I was one of those beta-ers last time around during FF3 release. I even did countdown to the release. I even got my own download certificate :). However, I don't want to eager myself to it this time. Here is why its different this time.

Firstly, its not a major release, meaning nothing changed BIG! If at all, The only thing that will get me motivated is the CTRL+Tab feature. But my existing Tab-Mix Plus plugin gives a tab list that is adequate. A 3D preview is nice to have but not so much to hurry to.

All the goodies are unused, The geocoding, Video, Audio, HTML5 and CSS3 support have nothing to offer until there are some REAL websites that start utilizing them. Especially the Geocoding, As much as it sounds cool, until it becomes a standard - it would be another browser specific dumb-a$$-nerdy feature I would refrain myself as a webmaster. The others follow the same rationale.

The much boasted JIT javascript is not enabled by default. WHAT? Why? I think 3.0 has a huge performance improvement from 2.0 that I only doubt this is going to matter for an end user. Would I like to try this out? Yeah sure! But it can wait until my Ubuntu auto updater hits the new update!

Mozilla needs to start a different approach for distributing betas. The default beta should always be an independent zip or tar file. Like one of those Portable Apps. This will make me go out there and check it out. Right out of box, No - doubt, fear or uncertainty. You know what I mean..

Finally, I was more interested in the private browsing to come. I am disappointed it dint make it in this beta. I will wait. So will the betas :)
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Powered By

As it goes, We ought to give thanks to people who power us. This page will be updated, like the version page , to show all the tools, and people this site is Powered By! Ubuntu GIMP Firebug Blogger Google [AppEngine, Ajax and other Apis] AddtoAny Project Fondue jQuery
Read More >>

How to Make a Local (Offline) Repository in Ubuntu / Debian

If you are in a place where you dont have internet (or have a bad one) You want to download .deb packages and install them offline. Each deb file is packaged as a seperate unit but may contain dependencies (recursively). apt-get automagically solves all the dependencies and installs all that are necessary. Manually install deb files one by one resolving each dependency would be tedious. A better approach is to make your own local repository. Before you actually make a repo, You need *all* deb files. You dont practically have to mirror all of the packages from the internet, but enough to resolve all dependencies. Also, You have to make sure, you are getting debs of the correct architecture of your system (i386 etc) # 1. make a dir accessible (atleast by root) sudo mkdir /var/my-local-repo # 2. copy all the deb files to this directory. # 3. make the directory as a sudo dpkg-scanpackages /var/my-local-repo /dev/null > \ /var/my-local-repo/Packages # 4. add the local repo to sour...
Read More >>

javascript maxlength for textarea with \r\n breaks in java (esp Firefox)

Textareas allow new lines to enter. These are represented by \n (1) or \r\n (2) characters. But when you save to DB you have a limit to certain length of chars. There is no maxlength attribute in HTML that will stop you from entering data. This is generally acomplished by Javascript. You do a onkeyup hook and stop event or trim after textarea.value.length > maxlength. There are many other solutions out there.. But.. Here is the problem that most of those solutions overlook, How do you deal with the count on \n and \r\n representations. Lets first see how it matters. If the text entered has new lines, the length is calculated differently in Firefox and IE. When you enter a Text like 01234 567890 You expect the textarea.value.length to be 11. (10 chars + new line).On the backend, however, java would recieve it as 12 chars (10 chars + \r\n) (this is irrespective of FF or IE). So you are effectively saving 12 chars to DB. Worse yet, IE seems to figure textarea.value.length as 12 (...
Read More >>