Archive for March, 2008

The latest release of WordPress is now available. I’ve installed it in a sandbox, and I have to admit that I really like the new look of the admin area, courtesy of the folks at Happy Cog (Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico specifically). Thankfully, my theme still works in the new version, as does Spam Karma and Official Comments.

I want to spend a little more time with the sandbox, but I’ll probably migrate this site to 2.5 in the next few days.

Google recently enabled “Search Suggest” at their official home page. I find this feature annoying, and I wanted a way to disable it. Thankfully, the solution was very simple:

1. Visit the Search Preferences page
2. Set the Query Suggestions option to “Do not provide query suggestions in the search box”
3. Save your preferences

I wish Google had made disabling this a little clearer, rather than quietly adding the preference to the preferences page.

For some time now, Firefox has supported an experimental CSS technique for rounding border corners (-moz-border-radius). The rendering engine in Firefox 2 does a barely acceptable job with this, though the rounded corners don’t appear to be uniformly sized, nor are they anti-aliased. Cairo, which drives the rendering engine in Firefox 3, does a much better job at handling the rounded corners, and the results are quite nice.

As such, I’m offering some ‘eye-candy’ to those users who visit this site with either Minefield or a Firefox 3 beta build. Those users will now note that code blocks (pre elements), as well as comment blocks, have nicely rounded edges. The end result looks great, and I hope you agree.

I believe I have made all of the necessary changes for both CoLT and Googlebar Lite to bring them into the Firefox 3 world. Unfortunately, the official add-ons website no longer accepts extensions with a maxVersion of 3.0.*. Therefore, in the interest of reducing the number of releases I have to make, I’m going to wait for beta 5 to be released before I release the new extensions. With any luck, beta 5 should appear in the near future, as the source tree has been frozen.

I’m in the process of getting CoLT and Googlebar Lite ready for Firefox 3. This involves making sure that I provide secure updates for my extensions. I have three choices as to how to go about doing this, and I don’t know what to do. Your input would be appreciated. Here are my options, along with the pros and cons of each:

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By default, Windows Explorer opens up in the “My Documents” folder, which is far from useful (assuming you don’t store all your documents there). Just today, I figured out how to get Windows Explorer to open in a folder that you specify. Here’s how to do it:

1. Right click the Windows Explorer shortcut and select Properties.
2. Make sure you are on the “Shortcut” tab.
3. Clear the Start in: field. Contrary to what you might think, Windows Explorer seems to ignore whatever you type here (which seems stupid to me).
4. Change the Target: field to the following:
   %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n,/e,{Desired_Path}. For example: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n,/e,C:\. Note that the commas are required!
5. Accept your changes.

Now, each time you open Windows Explorer, it will point to your desired location. This is an incredibly useful tip that will now save me two clicks for every explorer window that I open!

For the most part, I haven’t spent much time with Minefield. Firefox 2 works well enough for me that I haven’t had much desire to play around with the new stuff, especially seeing as many portions are inevitably either incomplete or broken. However, the recent beta 4 release prompted me to take it for a spin around the web. Here are a few thoughts on the latest build I’ve tested as of this writing (2008031205):

New Look

The new skin is interesting, but portions of it will definitely take some getting used to. Surely it’s not final (these things never are until the thing is actually released), so I’m hopeful there will still be a few tweaks. When using large toolbar buttons, the back button appears round, while the forward button is much smaller and rectangular; an odd pairing which is reminiscent of Internet Explorer 7. I tend to use the small toolbar buttons, so this change doesn’t affect me too much. The forward and back history menus have been consolidated into one menu (again, like IE7), which I think is a nice improvement. The new URL bar looks nice and provides a lot more information than the previous one did. A little star icon at the far right of the bar provides a quick means of bookmarking the current page, which is handy.

Improved Memory Usage

I put the new build through its paces at Google Maps, dragging around, zooming in and out, and generally trying to run up memory consumption (which I did successfully). After closing the corresponding tab, I noted that memory usage dropped considerably, and continued to decrease over time. The new garbage collection and memory defragmentation that has been implemented is clearly a big improvement. Firefox is still a hog, but it’s heading in the right direction.

Faster JavaScript

The JavaScript improvements which I recently mentioned are immediately noticeable. GMail and Google Maps feel a lot faster than they typically do, which is super great.

URL Bar Autocompletion

Autocompletion in the URL bar is now handled in a new (and exciting) way. As you type, matches are offered based on all text associated with a link. The page title, the URL itself, and bookmark keywords are all searched. Matched text can appear anywhere in the string, which is really handy.

Password Manager Prompts

The password manager now slides down from the top (like the information bar), so it’s not quite as intrusive. However, the handy keyboard shortcuts are no longer the same. In order to quickly answer the ‘Not Now’ choice, you have to press Alt+N instead of just N. This will take some getting used to.

Page Zoom

The new page zoom feature works really well. Images are magnified, as is the text on the page. There’s even an option to only zoom the text, leaving images alone. Pretty neat!

There are plenty of other changes in Minefield, so I recommend checking it out. I am starting to work on adding FF3 support to CoLT and Googlebar Lite, but it’s turning out to be a little more difficult than I initially thought. A host of code changes are needed in Googlebar Lite, since I’m currently using interfaces that are now deprecated. Hopefully I can get things updated in the near future.