October 25, 2006
FireFox 2.0 (Mac) is Crappy, Broken
It hangs (with spinning rainbow of death) all the time. Sometime it just crashes.
I'm switching back to 1.5 for a while. Luckily, it appears you can (at least FF 2.0 doesn't mess up your settings/prefs in an incompatible way...)
I wonder if the Windows or Linux versions are just as bad.
Update: Derek points out that google toolbar is the culprit. I've disabled it, and I'm back to FF2. I'll post later if it helps or not.
Posted by billo at 11:40 AM | Comments (3)
July 24, 2006
Firefox support required. Sorry.
[This post has a number of vague references to avoid embarrassing certain people. Including possibly me.]
At work we are in the middle of buying this really big, important and expensive piece of enterprise software. It's the kind of thing that you need to have when your business grows to a certain size. In this context, "important" means that having it will improve our revenue by probably millions of dollars over a few years. And "expensive" means that it will cost more than $100,000.
This particular kind of software has a relatively large number of vendors who sell it; there were four top-tier vendors bidding on our contract. They are trying to differentiate themselves on their capabilities, each claiming something the others don't have. In some cases, they are all claiming the same feature as uniquely theirs. In reality, they are largely all the same in their capabilities. Some do seem slightly better, but none seem so broken that we couldn't make it work and live with whatever warts it has. So it's all down to price.
I was on the phone with one of the vendors the other day, confirming a face-to-face meeting where they would get more detailed requirements and then be able to make a bid. Eventually, the sales rep casually asked something like, "I see you asked about FireFox support. We don't currently support that, but are looking into it. Is that a deal-breaker?"
I thought for a second, said "ummm..." Then: "Yes. We need FireFox support. I think we should cancel the meeting. Thanks for bringing that to our attention ahead of time."
I think the rep was pretty floored. He even said that he had never had this come up as a blocking issue. He asked if we could use virtualization, or if we had Windows PCs with IE that we could use. I basically said, yes we could do that, but why would I pay $100,000 for a piece of software that I need to use every day, then use some ugly hack to access it? Especially when all the competitors offer the support I want? I explained a bit more that about 80% of the people who needed this software didn't have Windows computers; they have either Macs or Linux. And the remaining 20% really don't like to switch out of FireFox in any case.
What amuses me most about this scenario?
1. Rule #1 of being a sales rep: never ask the question "is X a deal-breaker?" if there is any chance at all of hearing "yes." Don't give the mark a way out. (Not that this would have mattered in the long run. As soon as we found out it was a Windows/IE only application, that would have been the end.)
2. It's not so freaking hard to support FireFox and IE. All you need to do is not use some stupid ActiveX control, and have at least one engineer use FireFox. They both have great DHTML, Javascript and XML-HTTP support. They both support Flash and Java fairly well.
Actually, the second reason is a really important one. If you are not smart enough as an engineering organization to avoid proprietary, lock-in technology to the extent that supporting users beyond that is too costly, then I don't want to use your stuff.
Posted by billo at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)
July 14, 2006
How to upgrade to a recent FireFox on CentOS 4.3
I like CentOS more and more. Yesterday, I actually set it up as a workstation on a PC instead of a server. In doing so, I discovered that the FireFox that ships with CentOS is really old, like 1.0.7.
To upgrade to the latest thing, you need to enable the "centosplus" repository. Like this:
yum --enablerepo=centosplus upgrade firefox
Posted by billo at 09:33 AM | Comments (1)
July 05, 2006
Google browser sync
Why didn't I know about this before? It's exactly what I've been looking for since Bookmarks Synchronizer (which never worked very reliably) suddenly stopped working.
It's very cool: syncs bookmarks, cookies, remembered form fields, even tabs and windows between all my FireFox browser instances (8 of them) on Mac, Windows and Linux. Yes, I have a Windows PC. It's for games.
Posted by billo at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)
May 03, 2006
Tamper Data, a cool FireFox plugin
When I debug web sites (something I'm sure everybody does, right?), I like tools that let me look at the HTTP headers and such. Too what cookies actually are set, etc. One tool I liked was the Live HTTP Headers FireFox extension. Jeff just showed me an even better one: Tamper Data. It basically does the same thing, but there are two big differences.
First, it's formatting of the data is vastly better: there is a table of entries for each request with performance and summary data. This lets you figure out where your pages are fat: like included images or js or whatever. Then you can click on each request to find out more.
Second, you can go into "tamper mode," where you can edit the requests coming from your browser before they get to the server. This can be very handy.
Posted by billo at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2006
Camino Revisited
They released a new version of Camino this week, finally calling it "1.0."
I used to use Camino quite a bit. It is very well integrated into OS X, and
I especially like that it uses the Apple keychain for keeping passwords
vs. it's own private thing. But as with all browsers, I keep getting
pulled back into FireFox. Those extensions (especially bookmark sync
and web developer tools) are just too valuable to ignore. And it's
too annoying to keep switching browsers.
But Camino is so fast. It's fast like Safari, but doesn't have Safari's
weird incompatibilities. So I'm back to using it for a while, at least when I
am just wasting time browsing vs. doing work web site programming.
Posted by billo at 06:02 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2006
Hosting FireFox add-ons on your own site
As I just learned, if you want to host FireFox extensions on your own site,
you might have to add a mime type mapping to your apache config.
Here is the line I added:
application/x-xpinstall xpi
If you don't have this, your apache might assume the file is plain text, and the user will just get a screen full of junk.
Posted by billo at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
FireFox Bookmarks Synchronizer that works with 1.5.0.x
I find the FireFox add-on version management system supremely annoying. It's stupid that it assumes that your plugins won't work in the first place, and doesn't give you the option of overriding the installer's decision not to install.
It's extra stupid that an add-on that claims to work with 1.5 will not be allowed in 1.5.0.1. It's annoying how much time I waste tracking down updated plugins when I upgrade FireFox (across the 6 or seven different computers I use at home and work). Some add-ons have good support by their authors, and they are automatically fixed. But many are not. So one is forced to extract the .xpi file, hack it, repackage, then distribute it. (Thank goodness for FolderShare file sync!).
I just fixed bookmarks sync, and I'm putting it here for anybody else who wants it.
Posted by billo at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
November 30, 2005
FireFox 1.5 Stuff
So FireFox 1.5 is here. I've made the jump, and it seems mostly OK. But now I really need to fix the plug-ins I depend on... mostly Bookmarks Synch and Live HTTP headers.
I found a very nice site, beatnik pad, and the author has conveniently hacked up some FireFox Extensions that were unworking in 1.5. Righteous. I'm a beatnik subscriber now!
I find it very annoying that FireFox doesn't have a better bookmark sync built-in. This is the greatest single feature of Safari for people that have more than one computer. Don't an awful lot of people have at least two? One at home and one at work?
Posted by billo at 09:05 PM | Comments (1)