Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

Firefox 3 rocks!

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

I’ve been using Firefox 3 since the beta versions and have been really pleased with it. It seems to be much much faster than Firefox 2 was with sites loading pretty much instantly. It seems to be a little easier on memory and a lot easier on the CPU for me on FreeBSD.

I really haven’t experienced firefox slowing down to a crawl after opening a bunch of tabs like I did in previous versions. It used to happen with few certain sites that seemed to use a lot of java script. I would get the occasional crash on those sites and have experienced exactly zero crashes so far on the release version of FF3.

I like the new location bar a lot. It took a little getting used to because it worked a bit different than I had grown accustomed to but now I don’t think I could go back to the old way of doing things. It just makes more sense to search the way it does now.

I’m really thankful for those people who work on all of this great open source software out there. They do a great job with it.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Tags:
Posted in Computers | No Comments »

No OS war

Monday, February 25th, 2008

I see it it so many places and I just don’t understand why people have to try to make wars and that sort of thing out of which operating system to use.  They all have their pluses and minuses and really in the end isn’t having multiple reasonable choices the best outcome?  It’s great to have different options for different people who work differently. I just believe they all have their place.

I’ll admit windows 95 sucked bad with crashing.  win 98 was better.  I won’t even mention how much I diddn’t like windows 3.1. When I used winxp and the rare occasion that I have to use it now it’s been nothing but stable for me except for some wierd crashes when shutting down.  I never did solve that but that was about a year ago when I decided I wanted to use something other than windows as my main operating system.  There really was no reason to do that other than the fact that I wanted to try something different.  I haven’t used Vista but wouldn’t mind trying it.  I don’t want to pay so much for something I don’t think I’d really use so I don’t have it.

I tried a couple of Linux distros off and on for the past 8 years and none really stuck.  I don’t know why but they just didn’t stick.  I enjoyed them but they just didn’t click with me.  Maybe there were too many different distros that I wanted to try and didn’t have  enough time.

I ended up settling into using DesktopBSD.  I don’t really know why but I just became comfortable with it and have used it almost exclusively for close to a year now.  I’ve been able to solve any issues I have had with a little googling.  Gotta still love the freebsd handbook.  The ports also rock.  Everything is right there for me to use if I need it.  I like the fact that it’s pretty much just Freebsd with a kde automatically installed.  The nice thing about freebsd is everything is in one place. Things just pretty much work the way I expect them to.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Tags: , ,
Posted in Computers, bsd | No Comments »

Handy Firefox Extensions

Sunday, November 19th, 2006

Alt-Text for Links - Displays the url of the link in a popup. I find this handy because I know ahead of time where the link is taking me.

Download Status bar - This extension keeps track of downloads and shows the information in the status bar.

Enhanced History Manager - This basically is an advanced history manager for Firefox.

Forcastfox - Shows weather information in the statusbar of your browser.

Greasemonkey - This is a very useful plugin that allows you to modify webpages on the fly using user scripts. They can add or edit elements of a page to make it more useful or less cluttered.

IE Tab - This extension allows you to open up a link in a tab that uses internet explorer to show the web page in a tab. It’s usefu for those sites that just don’t seem to work in firefox or those ones that require Internet explorere. I rarely use it but it’s nice to know it’s just a click away in those rare situations when I need it.

Image Zoom - This firefox extension allows you to zoom any image on a page. I find this handy with those annoying graphic captchas.. With out this extension there would be a lot more sites that I am not able to use.

PDF Download - Using this handy extension gives you the choice to download a PDF file rather than display it in Firefox itself.

Tab Mix Plus - This adds more options for tabbed browsing. One of my favorite additions is the option to show a download progress bar for each tab.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Posted in Computers | No Comments »