Shiny new toys

[nameandnature]

I am currently laid up. I've been trying out Firefox 2.0. It looks quite good. On the Mac, it's faster then 1.5 and doesn't get bogged down when you leave it running for a long time (I tend to put the Powerbook into sleep rather than shutting it down). I've not tried it on Windows yet, as I use Mozex for editing Wiki entries at work, and that's not been updated for 2.0. The essential extensions have been updated, though: AdBlock and Greasemonkey being the two I use the most. It's always a shock to use someone else's machine and find their intarweb has adverts. I mean, how quaint. And you need Greasemonkey for LJ New Comments, which the people on lj_nifty seemed to like, bless 'em.

I like the spelling checker for form entries, and the way that you can now have it save and restore sessions, move tabs around, and put a close tab button in the corner of each tab. The smart completion thingy for Google searches is quite nice, as is the way that sites can offer their own search plugins which Firefox picks up on and can then install automatically (you can tell the site offers a plugin when the little arrow in the search box glows blue: thanks to marnanel for pointing that one out). I like the way that it can be configured to add RSS feeds to Bloglines, too.

While I was enjoying all this web 2.0 excitement, I thought I'd try out del.ico.us. It's a site that lets you store your bookmarks externally, so you can find them on any computer, and also lets you tag them with keywords so you can find them again easily (which is my main reason for using it: my bookmarks were getting out of control). You can see my bookmarks here, and there's also an RSS feed of them if you'd like to stalk me.

Comments

[unoriginal1729.livejournal.com]

I've been using FF 2.0 for a few weeks, and it seems quite nice. I was quite excited when I thought it would restart with the same pages open as you left it, like Opera does, but that only happens if it crashes. Sometimes I want to restart it anyway (such as when I want to reboot to get as many bits as possible available for Lightroom). So my approach is to Force Quit it, and then it behaves as desired. I can't help feeling that there ought to be a better way.

[nameandnature]

It will restart with the same pages on a normal quit if you tell it to: it's in the startup preferences in the Main tab on the Mac version. The drop-down that used to just have the "Show a blank page" and "Show my homepage" now has a "Restore from last session" option too. It's well hidden, I'll admit.

[unoriginal1729.livejournal.com]

Well, not that well hidden, but I did miss it on two passes of the config. Now I've changed it, but that means that when I open a new window I don't get my home page. That's not what I wanted!