Plugin update check doesn’t work for a number of plugins (in particular: FireBug and Web Developer.)
You can get FireBug to work by visiting getfirebug.com and downloading the 1.1 beta.
Get Web Developer to work by visiting the web developer plugin page. While, you’re doing that, visit Chris Pederick’s home page and click on an ad. It’s the least you can do.
My first impression of the latest beta (b4) is that it seems very fast page rendering. Maybe as fast as Safari.
I’ve always had trouble debugging layout problems on Safari. There is a hidden “debug” menu on Safari, but it almost completely useless, especially when compared to something like FireBug.
Today I found that if you download the latest version of webkit, which is the open source Safari implementation, there is a visual DOM inspector thing that is really what you need. You right click on some page element, and select “Inspect element” then you get a nice DOM browser with highlighting, and details on CSS info, etc.
FireFox startup performance has been bugging for a long time. FireFox is such a great browser, and the add-ons are so useful, I really can’t use anything else for browsing. But sometimes, if I’m in a hurry, I start Safari or (horrors) IE, because I know they will pop open much faster, sometimes 15-20 seconds faster than FireFox.
What bothered me even more was that FF was still slow starting on my super fast new quad-xeon workstation. I mean, what the hell is it doing?
Duh!
It dawned on me the other day: it was checking for updates for FF and plugins on every startup! Safari and IE don’t pay that penalty, since the OS does the checking for them.
So I went into the options, advanced, updates, and turned off all auto checking for updates. Now FireFox starts up in 1 second.
I was using the excellent FireBug add-on on my own site here. It really shows the crap you can quickly build up. I noticed that the meebo widget and MyBlogLog tracking were both eating up over 80% of page load time. Since I hardly ever use that stuff, I turned them off.
Quantcast and Google analytics were allowed to stay, since they use a very modest amount of load time.
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.
[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.
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
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.
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.
