David Herrold

FireFox 3 upgrade for Mac

Posted by Dave | Filed under Browsers, Software, Usability

I just finished upgrading to FireFox 3.0 and so far the good outweighs the bad. Some things I noticed immediately are the bookmarks in my toolbar are completely rearranged and outdated.

Several of my bookmark folders were simply replaced by two folders called “Most Visited” and “Places.” It’s almost as if the installation grabbed an old copy of my bookmarks as it upgraded.

That is forcing me to scramble to find some old back-up copies of my bookmarks. And that is a pain. About half my add-ons are working correctly. I consider the following add-ons to be essential for any installation of FireFox: Web Developer toolbar, FireBug, TabMix Plus. TabMix Plus isn’t compatible with FireFox 3.0 yet; nor is Mr. UpTime, TinyURL creator and view source chart. But I can live without those for a while (until the developers update them…hint, hint).

The good news.

The speed is fantastic. The startup and shutdown times for FireFox 3.0 seems at least 3 times faster than FireFox 2.0. Even faster than I expected.

FireFox 3.0 appears to be using less memory (RAM) than FireFox 2.0 used on a regular basis. This frees up more memory for other apps to be open at the same time.

The navigation bar has been slightly redesigned, making the back button (pictured above) larger than the forward button (and also graying out the forward button when it is not needed). This is an excellent example of Fitt’s Law (the time to acquire a target is directly related to the size and distance of the target) in action. Mozilla’s interaction designer probably noted that most people use the back button far more than they use the forward button and adjusted the size to reflect that. Pretty sharp.

Overall, I’d say the upgrade was pretty positive with a few hiccups.

Take my advice and back up your entire machine (on an external source) before upgrading. That way you can simply copy over anything you may be missing (or back out of the upgrade gracefully if something goes awry).

Speaking of Firefox add-ons…what are some of your favorites?

Tags: browser, FireFox, firefox3, mozilla

FireFox user agent switcher

Posted by Dave | Filed under Browsers, Productivity, Software, Usability

I’ve been working on our mobile site a lot lately and found this great FireFox plugin that has helped me a great deal. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how newspaper sites present their mobile-friendly WAP sites. WAP usability and interface designs are wildly different in comparison to their full-featured main websites.

The tricky thing about investigating mobile sites is that many of them sniff out your user agent and redirect you to the mobile site only if they detect you are using a mobile browser. Several actually filter in the other direction as well.

Try this little test and you will see exactly what I mean. Try going to mobile.nytimes.com (new window) in your browser right now. If you are using a normal browser (IE, FireFox, Safari, Opera, etc) you will be redirected to the New York Times’ main site. This redirect forces you to use an actual wireless device to surf the New York Times’ mobile version.

This, my friends, is a tad annoying when trying to investigate mobile sites.

To get around this I installed a great FireFox addon by Chris Pederick that enables me to set my user agent to any browser I’d like (including mobile browsers like the Blackberry, Iphone, Treo, etc). I found a few user agents for mobile browsers here to configure the addon and I was good to go.

Now I can simply tell FireFox to act like an iPhone and it will render those automatically redirecting sites without any trouble. Fantasitc.

I told a co-worker about this cool addon to FireFox and he responded “Oh yeah, Safari has a user agent switcher built in. Check it out.”

He’s absolutely right.  Looks like Safari includes the ability to render pages as an iPhone if you want. Pretty cool, although I still use the FireFox addon to spoof Blackberries, Treos, and any other mobile browser I can find. Here are the links you’ll need to make this happen:

FireFox user agent switcher addon
Resource for user agents (not just mobile)

Hope you found this useful.

Tags: add-ons, FireFox, Mobile, user agent

Mr. Uptime great FireFox add-on

Posted by Dave | Filed under Browsers, Productivity, Software

I’ve been using the Mr Uptime FireFox add-on for several months now and it just dawned on me that I use it fairly often. Mr. Uptime saves me time and hassles in one fell swoop. Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you are reading your favorite RSS feed or visiting your favorite news aggregator (digg, slashdot, whatever…). You click on a link that is referenced on the site and …blam…404 file not found. For whatever reason, the site is currently down or experiencing database problems, DNS issues, they didn’t pay their electric bill…whatever.

That is where Mr. Uptime steps in. It notices that you couldn’t reach the site and offers to monitor the page in question until it becomes available. As soon as it’s available, it will offer to open that page in a new tab, window or simply alert you that it’s available now. I have mine set to alert me and open a new tab in the background, so it doesn’t disturb whatever I’m reading at the moment.

There is also a nifty menu option that allows you to highlight some text on a page (such as an SQL error) and set a rule to watch for that SQL error to go away. It then notifies you when that SQL error goes away (see image below).

That about covers it. You can download the Mr. Uptime FireFox add-on here. It’s free and pretty cool.

No go forth and surf; and don’t worry about site getting Dugg or Slash Dotted. Mr. Uptime can keep an eye on them for you.

Tags: 404, add-ons, browser, FireFox, Mr Uptime

Getting Flocked

Posted by Dave | Filed under Blogging, Browsers, Software

I downloaded Flock over the weekend and plan on kicking the tires for a few weeks to see if I like it. Flock is a browser based on the Mozilla FireFox browser (that you all should be using by now because it contains vitamins and minerals and buttery goodness and it works on lots of operating systems out there).

Flock does something FireFox doesn’t. It connects people to their social networks out of the box. When you open Flock for the first time, you need to configure it to connect to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Delicious, etc. It then logs you into all of your accounts at once and opens up a sidebar that allows you to see all of your social networks in one nice package.

I’ve just started playing with the blogging functionality of the browser as well. It lets you post entries to any number of popular blog sites without ever leaving the webpage you are currently reading.

I hope Flock gets some more market share in the browser wars. At the very least, FireFox can get some great ideas from them for a more socially connected browser experience.

The one thing I wish Flock had…extensions. FireFox is a development dynamo with loads of extensions to help web developers. So far, Flock is very limited in that arena. My hope is that Flock will eventually allow a smooth integration with all FireFox extension.

If that happened, it wold probably make the switch much easier for the development community.

Flock covers all their bases and is currently offering versions in Windows, Mac and Linux.

I’ll let you know what I think in the coming weeks. My goal is to use it several times a week until the end of the year.

Tags: Browsers, FireFox, Flock, social networks, Software