Firefox is bloatware

Firefox has officially outlived its usefulness.

I have three computers and 5 operating systems**, each of which has Firefox installed. Now I'm no historian but I seem to remember Firefox promising to be a good web browser and all that jazz. Sure it's better than IE in several ways however it's my firm belief that Firefox has become bloatware.

You might be thinking that I've always felt this way, never really liked Firefox and there for never gave it a fair chance. However this is not true. I didn't start seriously hating Firefox until about five minutes ago.

So here's my story. I'm on an old laptop (400mhz 192mb ram, win2k) out and about on vacation connecting through a whiz-bang Sierra Wireless 595U AirCard. So I boot up Win2k and the first thing I do is start Firefox since I know it takes forever and a day to load.

So after I hit Firefox I opened up the Sprint Mobile Broadband connection thingy and connect. Firefox STILL hasn't opened. By this point it's taking so long I'm thinking perhaps I didn't click the icon. A few moments later Firefox finally opens. By the way that Sprint connection tool isn't even on my desktop like Firefox. I gotta navigate the start menu to open it then the program has to go through about 5 steps before I can even CLICK connect - then there's another two or three steps before it's totally connected. I was able to do all of this before Firefox even showed up on the screen.

You're probably thinking "big shocker, you're on an old laptop". Wrong. On my 1.5ghz with 512mb of ram Firefox is slow, on my 2ghz machine that has 1gb of ram Firefox is still slow ! Now if 2ghz + 1gb of ram isn't enough muscle to open Firefox swiftly I'd like to know what in gods name is.

On the other hand Opera, Safari (Windows beta) and the dreaded IE all run worlds faster than Firefox. Perhaps I wouldn't care that much if FF and all its fan boys weren't constantly beating that drum which says Firefox is the greatest, fastest and most secure.

Let me state this part again; previous to about 5 minutes ago I liked Firefox, I was using it upwards of 50 times a day. But as of right now no more, screw Firefox. It can't keep me logged into sites for crap, it loads and operates slower than Christmas and somewhere along the way its spell check has gone to hell.

For an example I just opened FF and misspelled vegetable on purpose. I typed "vegitabe" which is exactly two letters off. This should be easy. If you put "vegitabe" in Google it knows right away which word you meant. Here are the suggested spelling corrections Firefox gives me : veritable, veritably, ignitable, inevitable and inevitably.

None of these are EVEN CLOSE to what I typed and out of this whole list "vegetable" isn't mentioned. Way to fail Firefox. And this kind of crap happens to me all the time. I've had dozens of instances where I was one or two letters off on a commonly used word and Firefox "suggest" words totally unrelated and fails to give me the correct spelling.

I decide to run a little test. So I fired up Firefox and disabled the few addons that I use, rebooted the computer and the ran Opera + Firefox at the same time to see what the load difference is. I put both desktop icons side by side and each time I started Firefox first, then press the right arrow key and hit enter to load Opera.

Initial load time : Opera shows on the taskbar a full 5 seconds before Firefox appears.

Round two load time : Opera pops up a full 4 seconds before Firefox shows up.

So for me that's it. I'm tired of Firefox's slow performance, I'm making a full switch to Opera. By the way, it's worth noting that a lot of features people love about IE7 and Firefox started off in Opera. Opera has always been way ahead of the game and has managed to keep their browser small, fast and customizable (Opera 9.26 installer is 4.7mb, Firefox 2.0.0.12 is 5.7mb).

**
Windows XP Pro
Windows XP Pro
Windows 2k Pro
Damn Small Linux
Puppy Linux

Strange tone / beep in KDE related to kwifimanager

Recently when using KDE I've been hearing a strange tone that loops in the background. As you can guess searching Google for "strange sound kde" can be pretty uneventful.

I decided to check `top` first and discovered kwifimanager sitting at well... the top.

After killing the process the strange KDE tone vanished. I'm not sure what KDE or kwifimanager has to do with this issue. I recently started using it without issue then all of a sudden I'm getting this tone. I know for a fact that I didn't experience this problem when I first started using kwifimanager.

I also use gnome with my wifi and experience no strange tones.

System Specs
Debian Etch 4.0r1
Linux 2.6.18-5-686 #1 SMP
KDE 3.5.5
kwifimanager 4:3.5.5-5
Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)

Opera stuff

Just discovered some of this stuff for Opera.  So far it's made my Opera experience a lot more enjoyable.

• How to make Opera look like other browsers
  
• Customize Google for Opera
• Firefox skins for Opera
  
• Del.icio.us buttons
  

Windows Firefox install size off the charts

Take a careful look at this picture - something* is very wrong.

Your first natural thought is probably that I simply have my cache set to ~500 MB or so. Wrong.

I don't think I ever adjusted my cache settings. Right now FF claims it's using a mere 50 MB for the cache.




If you're totally clueless to the cause of this issue welcome to the party cause I am too.

A weak shot in the dark would be addons, skins and all that other stuff.

Wrong. Wrong and wrong again.

A quick trip to Explorer clears up the confusion. I have two rather large PS (post script) files (200+ MB a piece). These are the results of some fairly large File->Print->Print to file operations.

So if you discover your Firefox (or whatever else) installation size is OFF THE CHARTS check out the folder in Explorer. Chances are it's just some other files laying around throwing off the numbers.


* Bonus points if you noticed that Windows gets the "last used" date all wrong. The screen shot (like this post) was taken @ 10/26/2007 however WinXP claims FF was last used on 10/22/2007. I've used FF at least 100 times since 10/22 !

Debian : Install Firefox

Tonight I made the switch from Ubuntu 6.10 to Debian 4. My first priority is getting Firefox (not Iceweasel) up and running. As you probably know this isn't a straight forward situation. After a bit of searching I still didn't have a clear cut answer.

The error I kept getting was :

./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libmozjs.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I also got :

./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

A quick search shows that most of the files missing live in :

/home/me/firefox
/usr/lib/iceweasel

Of the possible solutions this is the one that worked for me. I know it's not the prettiest fix but it will due.

1. Download and unzip Firefox.
2. apt-get install libstdc++5
3. Copy the libs from /home/you/Firefox/ to /usr/lib/ (or some other acceptable place).
4. Run firefox-bin from the directory you unzipped it in.

Other possible solutions :
Add /home/you/Firefox to your path
Create symbolic links from the libs in /Firefox/ to /usr/lib (or something)

Other files Firefox may complain about being missing :

libfreebl3.so
libnspr4.so
libnss3.so
libmozjs.so
libnssckbi.so
libplc4.so
libplds4.so
libsmime3.so
libsoftokn3.so
libssl3.so
libxpcom_compat.so
libxpcom_core.so
libxpcom.so
libxpistub.so

Ubuntu : Firefox crashes related to VLC plugin

There is a lot of confusion about this topic so I'm going to keep it short and sweet.

I was using Ubuntu 6.06 + Firefox + VLC plugin, life was good, everything worked.

Then I upgraded to Ubuntu 6.10. Shortly there after I noticed that I couldn't stream audio of the x-mplayer2 variety. As soon as the page which initiates the stream loads Firefox would crash.

I tried a number of fixes but they didn't work :

-reinstalled Firefox
-reinstalled VLC + its plugins

When I ran Firefox from the command line upon crashing this is the only error I would get :

Segmentation fault (core dumped)

After much Googling it came to my attention that the plugin which handles such media types (the VLC plugin) may be to blame.


Long story short : I noticed the latest version of the VLC plugin is 0.8.6 which Synaptic told me I had installed. However about:plugins in Firefox told me the VLC plugin version was 0.8.4

It seems that when VLC upgraded it only upgraded the libvlcplugin.so in these locations :

/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/libvlcplugin.so
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libvlcplugin.so

and not in this location :

/home/Me/.mozilla/plugins/libvlcplugin.so

So I deleted the above copy of libvlcplugin.so and then used Synaptic to do another re-install of the VLC plugin. I then copied libvlcplugin.so from /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/ to /home/Me/.mozilla/plugins/

Firefox no longer crashes when I visit the offending pages (sites that use the VLC plugin) however my streaming radio still doesn't work.

Hopefully this information will be of some help.

Teh Post 1yr Anniversary !

Today (or tomorow..maybe yesterday, I'm not really sure) marks the 1 year anniversary for Teh Post !

Woot !

Teh Post has come a long way. The first version of Teh Post used the standard lame-o blogger templates.  Now Teh Post boast features almost no other web sites have (look closely).

The very first post on Teh Post was about how a major web masters forum was cheating digg. Since then I've covered Opera, Linux, Windows, Grub, Enemy Territory, AdSense, Nvidia tweaks, a previously reported botnet (!), Wordpress, Firefox, Xubuntu, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Windows Live Spaces, Cricket (the cell phone company), MySpace, Web 2.0, Internet Explorer 6, Security, Motorola Hacking, Ad-Aware, Gnome, Cingular, Blogger and maybe a few other things I've over looked.

It's nice to have passed the year mark, many blogs and web sites never make it this long. I read once that the average life span for a blog is 9 months, I'm a full 3 months a head of the game !

Teh Post has strived to bring you consice, reliable and important information. I'm not in the business of posting crap everyday just to put new info out there or to keep up with the Jone's.

Many of the post here cover problems I actually had myself and then tracked down the solution for. Although a lot of my information can be found at other web sites I try to keep things short and to the point. There is nothing I hate more than going to a site to get some info for a fix only to find five some odd pages of unimportant crap.

After this one year of service I'd like to ask a question of you my visitors. Why don't yall ever leave me some comment love ?

Cheers and I look forward to another (more exciting) year. Keep an eye open for Teh Post in a news article near you ;)

Sincerely,
Management

ps. Get back to work, you're not being paid to believe in the power of your dreams.

;)

Web Design & Font Size aka Don't use small fonts retard

Many web masters seem painfully unaware of any news that doesn't come from digg, their favorite web master forum or some other social bookmarking site.

I've read two studies that show web browsing has become the new favorite hobby for many retired people. This isn't noticed by most web designers (or other people in general) because another study showed that older people (retired age) were less likely to interact when on the net. In the event they do "interact" there is a decent chance they are choosing to interact with people in their age range to avoid all the lame teenagers on the internet who "know it all".

Short version : there are lots of old people on the net but they aren't interacting

What does it all mean ?

This is the part that really gets me. I'm in my mid twenties and I run across sites all the time that use a 9px font for regular text. Are you retarded ? I have excellent vision and even I have trouble reading fonts this small. Furthermore, even if I can read it what makes anyone think I want to read 9px font for hours on end ?

Web masters do this in order to cram more content on the page for one reason or another. But in most cases they end up loosing visitors because the font is so stupidly small. Before anyone leaves me a comment saying "oh but duh you can resize the font doing XYZ". Guess what, not everyone knows that. Do you think your grandma knows that ? There is a good chance she doesn't. On top of that there are many web pages that have fixed sized fonts, they can't be enlarged. Why people engage in this level of stupidity is beyond me.

Short version : Hey web masters, make your fonts bigger and make them re-sizable. No one wants to read whatever it is your writing on a 9px font.

FYI : In firefox you can resize fonts by holding down the CTRL key and scrolling the mouse wheel (towards you for bigger, away for smaller). Also you can hold CTRL and press the + key. In IE I think you can go to View -> Font Size.

US Gov GPO site hacked ?

Can anyone explain this picture ?

Hoodia is an ingredient which many diet pill companies claim will cause weight loss. I was searching the net for information .gov sites had about hoodia and came across this.

How did a .gov site end up with a "buy-hoodia" type spam site attached to it ?



gpo.gov belongs to the U.S. Government Printing Office
purl.access.gpo.gov belongs to the U.S. Government Printing Office's PURL Information Page

What is a "PURL" ?, from the PURL FAQ :

1.1 What does PURL stand for?
PURL stands for "Persistent Uniform Resource Locator."

1.2 What is a PURL?
Functionally, a PURL is a URL.

Instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service. The resolution service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client, which can then complete the transaction in the normal fashion.


Any ideas ?

Opera : Change the default search engine

Here is an easy way to change the default search engine Opera uses.

1. Open C:\Program Files\Opera\search.ini


2. Find the search engine you want as the cut it's block of code excluding the stuff inside the brackets []


3. Past that code under [Search Engine 1] at the top.


4. Move the original code from [Search Engine 1] to where ever to cut the code from in step two.