walkah: firefox

For a long time I've maintained that I hate web applications. It's good for a laugh (in certain circles), but has been mostly true. Web interfaces have (traditionally) been clunky, lack integration with the desktop, don't work offline, and are generally just unpleasant to use.

Lately, I've been re-testing that theory and have surprised myself with the results:

I'm living in the browser.

OK, not entirely. But my currently running applications include: Firefox, Emacs, Terminal, Adium and iTunes (sorry, songbird).

The frequent, attentive readers among you know that I've been tinkering with "Single Site Browsers" lately as part of this experiment - because, if I'm using Firefox for development - I don't want "other stuff" cluttering that. Well, a recent article on lifehacker made me rethink my approach.

The article outlines a way to have "permanent" tabs(i.e. tabs that automatically reload when you restart yoru browser) that only appear as a favicon (thus saving screen real estate). My current lineup looks like this :

That's gmail (personal and work), remember the milk, google voice and google reader.

For the last few weeks, I've been trying out this system and have found little reason to want to switch away from it. There are some properties that appeal to me: my application list is entirely cross-platform (substitute pidgin for adium) and free software. Application management, setup and configuration is minimal and I have to do very little application switching throughout the day. In fact, with my external monitor, I can fit everything on one screen where I can see it.

Ditching a desktop mail reader was obviously the biggest shift. But in the case of gmail, rtm and google reader there are a few things in common that make these "work" for me as desktop replacements: offline mode (thanks to google gears), extensive keyboard shortcuts (better than their desktop equivalents), regular updates / improvments and APIs / methods for extensions.

Here's my current list of Firefox extensions, let me know if I'm missing any great ones:

• 1Password
• Better Gmail 2
• Better GReader
• Evernote Web Clipper - still determined to use evernote effectively
• FaviconizeTab
• Firebug (always)
• Gmail S/MIME
• Google Gears - offline goodness
• Greasemonkey
• PermaTabs Mod
• Remember The Milk for Gmail - to help solve the problem of my todo list not getting enough 'focus'

How much of your life do you spend living in your browser?

My favorite web browser slash social movement, Firefox, released version 3.0 yesterday. To generate some buzz around the new release, the folks at Mozilla are trying to set a Guinness World Record for software downloads in 24 hours. They're initial target was 5 million downloads. As of this writing, they're at 6.5 million downloads and counting - with 6 hours to go!

I also spent a few hours last night at the Mozilla Toronto launch party. Mozilla is full of great people doing great work... it was nice to help celebrate their latest milestone.

If you haven't yet, go now. Get Firefox 3.

i just refreshed again and it looks like its official : firefox 2 has been released

truth be known, I've been using firefox 2 for a while (off and on through betas and exclusively since RC1) but i thought i'd wait to post about it so that i didn't overload the mozilla.org servers with my referral traffic. ;)

version 2 is a pretty solid (although arguably subtle) upgrade. performance feels much snappier and the UI update is nice... but my favourite improvements are:

• tab updates: close buttons on each tab, and the new tab scrolling feature is very handy for those of us with typically 30+ tabs open.
• built in "session saver": firefox restarts to your last set of tabs - great for those rare crashes.
• inline spellchecking : makes me look smrt ;)
• configurable feed subscription handling: since i prefer using external feed readers

looking at that list, i realize what firefox 2 really means is I don't need nearly as many extensions as I used to to get my firefox the way i like it. go get it (or check the full list of changes).

so, it looks like flock 0.4.10 fixes my bug. hurray! it would appear that categories aren't yet working. oh, and i'd love to be able to configure tags... but we're definitely getting there.

cross-platform blogging / etc here i come.!

well, i had a fairly long post all about how nice I thought the latest version (0.4.9) of flock was. i've been quietly kind of harsh on the idea since keeping pace with the firefox codebase can't be easy, and i already have tools and/or firefox extensions that accomplish large pieces of flocks "added value". i also formed these opinions based on version 0.2.

fast forward a couple months (and a couple conferences) and low and behold, flock is starting to come together. to be honest, I've been quiet about my reservations because i happen to know and really respect a couple of flockers. so, i have faith that flock one day will totally rock. and given my current forced cross-platform-ness, the idea of a blogging app in my browser is much more appealing.

another really nice thing (from my point of view) is they've done an excellent job of ensuring that the popular (and as far as i'm concerned essential) firefox extensions all work with flock.

but i've still got a beef. like i said i had a long post. problem is, the blogging tool in flock isn't quite there yet. it's a minor bug - but one that makes posting from flock to drupal impossible. so, after a few minutes of debugging, i managed to at least come up with a bug report. looks like someone from blojsom noticed too.

anyway guys, keep up the good work... and if you ever have questions about ensuring harmony between drupal and flock - you know where to find me :)

OH - speaking of flock. so here's an off the wall rumour that is based on absolutely no real information. but it's no mistake that Y! (not google) is the default search engine for flock. factor in the out-of-the-box flickr integration, mix in constant rumours of the "google browser" and ... well... are we looking at a future Y! acquisition? who knows perhaps throw in some lightning and upcoming.org integration and away you go.

then, once we become BrY!ght - we'll all be co-workers.

er. i'll stop now ;)