Posts Tagged Firefox

I’m a Firefox fangirl of long standing.  That said, I had very nearly completely switched completely to Chrome while on my less-than-powerful work computer because of the sheer bloat that Firefox seemed to carry with it.

Chrome was fast. Zooming fast.  Chrome had a tiny little memory footprint. Running Chrome and QuickBooks together didn’t make my computer sputter and stall.

What Chrome was not, and still is not, is nearly as customizable, and I like customization.  While there were clone addons that worked similarly to the essential-for-paranoids AdBlocker and NoScript, there were several others that were missing that I consider near essentials.

So now we have Firefox 3.5.  I’ve played around with it for a few days since its official release, and I am very pleased.   It was fast to start up (3.0 regularly took 5 minutes or more), it was even faster to close down. The one time that it did crash, the recovery tool allowed me to load the “safe” tabs, but skip reloading the tab that caused the crash.

I ran it, with five tabs open, one of them being a fairly memory-intensive site, with QuickBooks.  My work computer did not die.

So so far, Firefox 3.5 has passed what few tests I could put it through with flying colors.  If you’ve downloaded it and are looking for some basic and addons, here are my recommendations:

• NoScript and AdBlock Plus:  These two are essential if you’re at all worried about security.  NoScript blocks all scripts running on any page until you give permission to run them, and AdBlock blocks the places malicious scripts most like to hide: in advertisements.  Besides, the web without ads is a slightly prettier place to be.

• X-Marks: This was formerly FoxMarks, the bookmark manager that would sync your bookmarks across multiple locations (work and home, for instance).  It’s now added password syncing and support for Safari and Internet Explorer (hence the name change).  Since the best password is a randomly generated one that you don’t know, this helps insure that you don’t have to remember the passwords. Xmarks does it for you.

• Read it Later: I’m fond of online books and web libraries…but I don’t always want to clog up my bookmarks with stories that I want to read but probably won’t visit again once I’ve read them, or research materials I’ll only need temporarily.  Read it Later keeps a links list of things that you want to read but don’t necessarily want to keep on your bookmarks list…once read, you can easily mark them read and remove them.

There are others, of course, for more advanced and specific purposes, but these are the ones that I absolutely am unwilling to do without. The others are just icing on the cake.

As I was saying before I was interrupted by the Firefox 3.5 update.

I haven’t done one of my random all-encompassing update posts in a while, though, and I don’t have any real over-arching theme for today, so here goes some randomness:

• Remember that comic artist friend of mine, Steph Sakurai (aka S. Cherrywell), that I’ve mentioned on and off here? Well, she’s found a publisher for her first print book at Slavelabor Graphics, an indy comic publisher known for dark humor, but also for their contract work on several Disney properties, including Gargoyles. Steph’s book is due out in January, so start looking for it in your comic shops then!  I’ll have more information, and possibly some cover art previews for you closer to the release date. (For Steph’s webcomics, see Intragalactic and Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy)
• I’ve submitted a story to the NPR/New Yorker Three-Minute Fiction contest. If you’re a writer and have something short enough to submit, you should too! It should be any piece of short fiction that can be read in three minutes or less (about 500-600 words), and the winner will be read on national NPR stations.  Once the contest is over, I’ll be putting a copy of the piece up here on my portfolio.
• The hastily declared National GLBT Month of June has passed without comment here, rather as I expected.  Pride parades never seem to make it to small town bible thumping Georgia.  It was a nice gesture on the President’s part, but nothing more than a gesture. I can see both sides of the issue here, the President not wanting to endanger other issues by coming out too heavily on the side of Gay Rights, and the people who complain that what he’s done is no where near enough.
• The costumes still aren’t started, but I have a good picture in my head now of what I want, and fortunately it won’t take nearly as much work or time as The Giant Pink Dress.  Bryant’s costume may still change, however. Looking for some more ideas.
• The cats are being cats. This morning “Brother-Mew” decided he wanted to go to work with me again and went marching out into the garage in front of me and waiting for me at the car.  I  considered asking my boss if we could possibly employ him for part time “work snuggies.”
• Finally, before I bore you all completely to death, a quick congratulations goes out to Kari of Mythbusters on the birth of her baby, Neil Gaiman for winning the Locus award, and my boss for managing to make it through a whole vacation only calling the office once a day.  A fond farewell to Blogatelle, one of the best WoW RP blogs I’ve ever seen. That site, even non-updated, will continue to be a resource that I send new roleplayers to for information for as long as it remains.

And that’s that.  I promise I’ll have, you know, an actual topic when I post again Friday.

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• 2009 Locus Award winners (boingboing.net)
• Firefox 3.5 Approaches 1 Million Downloads; Watch in Real-Time (mashable.com)