Archive for the 'Computer Nerdery' Category
Windows 7 Beta: Microsoft’s Back in the Saddle Again
January 12th, 2009
A lot of people want the Windows 7 beta that good ol’ Microsoft released into the wild on Friday, 9 January 2009. Considering how hotly its been discussed in every tech-blog on the Internet, how much stir even screenshots of the damn thing have made, and how many tens of thousands of times a simple technical preview of the damn thing has been downloaded via BitTorrent…well, one would think that MS would have had a clue that officially releasing the beta into the wild would draw lots of attention. But, as usual, the public launch on Friday didn’t go as planned because they “underestimated” the number of people who’d be interested in downloading the beta. Their servers simply couldn’t take the beating and went casters-up within minutes of Friday afternoon’s delayed and delayed and delayed release.
Now, by way of “apology,” Microsoft has said, “Ah, to hell with limiting the beta to only 2.5 million downloads—all’a’y’all can have at it until January 24th! Enjoy!”
Regardless of whether this was just a typical Microsoft oversight or a deliberate ploy to drum up even more talk and excitement surrounding their forthcoming flagship release, it seems to me that the Ballmer Brigade knows exactly what it’s doing this time around. Microsoft has learned a lot from the Vista debacle, and it shows not only in the testing/marketing of Windows 7 but also in the actual construction of the product itself.
First, before we even get into my first impressions of Windows 7, let me say a few things about Vista. Vista is not a bad OS. Today, at least. In mid-November, I decided to invest in a new desktop computer, and because I’ve had good luck with HPs, I purchased a new one with a whopping 600gb hard-drive and 8 gigs of RAM. I was a little wary of it at first, because it came with the 64-bit version of Vista, and I’d read many a horror tale online (especially concerning music-related soft/hardware) about poor 64-bit driver support, endless software issues, and possible incidents of daemonic possession concerning Vista x64. However, all that storage plus 8 gigabytes of RAM for under $800? Hell, if any of my musical *ware didn’t work, I could always return the machine and look for something else.
Turned out my fears were mostly baseless. True, I have a few 32-bit VST plugins that won’t work on Vista x64, but they’re not even ones I use very often; everything else has worked just fine. And Vista x64 runs a thousand times better than Vista x32.
Of course, the different in bits—plus the quadcore processor, plus the RAM—certainly gives Vista a lot more room to work on this new computer as compared to my old one (dualcore processor, 300GB hard-drive, 2GB of RAM)…but Vista just flat-out works better on the new machine, in ways that have nothing to do with greater physical resources. My old machine didn’t originally come with Vista; it was born an XP machine, and just never took to the OEM version of Vista x32 that I put on it when Vista first came out. Even after the release of SP1, Vista on the older machine was unstable, cranky, and flatout more trouble than it was worth. Program crashes were an hourly affair. Sometimes it would recognize my pathetic M-Audio MobilePRE USB soundcard, and sometimes most of the time it wouldn’t (though I suspect the problem here lay more with the fact that the device was a complete Piece O’ Shit*). Anytime I tried to put the computer to sleep—or even change the screensaver: BSOD.
Even after two years of availability, my experience with Vista was so disheartening that I fully expected to wipe it off the hard-drive of my new computer and throw XP x64 on it.
Instead, I have not had a single problem with the Vista installation on my new computer. It is just as stable as XP ever was. I have had no hardware problems whatsoever. And, for that matter, no software problems aside from the aforementioned handful of VSTs. Vista 64-bit is a smokin’ awesome OS. At least I think so. Now.
Vista has finally matured into a decent step up from XP…even if, ultimately, it’s not that much of a step up. But just as it’s coming into its own, it’s going to be utterly eclipsed by Windows 7. Just as Windows ME was eclipsed by the vastly-superior Windows XP.
The problem with Vista—which Microsoft is most certainly not repeating with Windows 7—is that MS bungled the production and the launch of the OS. When the first beta of Vista came out, I was eager to try it, and really liked it: the new Aero look was sleek and pretty (I admit, I’m a sucker for eyecandy), and there were quite a few interface tweaks—especially in Explorer—that I quickly found indispensable. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why or how it took Microsoft five years to produce the OS, but…at least it seemed pretty decent. If, of course, they worked the bugs out of it before they released it. But hey, that’s why you do widespread beta-testing, right? To scare all the insects to the surface and swat them as they come crawling out of their holes.
When Vista went Golden in January of 2007, though…it was actually worse than the beta. I’d had some minor problems with driver support using the beta, but nothing to write home about. You expect that with a beta. The driver support in the final release of Vista was nothing short of execrable, however. It was a demonstrable step backwards from the beta. And rather than get better over time, it got even worse. Somehow, the patching process kept making Vista worse rather than better. Who the hell ever heard of an OS that gets worse and develops more problems over time? (Well, Mac OS X Leopard did, too, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)
Simply put, Microsoft rushed the damn thing out the door. They’d spend five masturbatory years dicking around with the code and suddenly found themselves facing being left behind as Apple released another major upgrade to their OS. The OS was a Gordian nightmare of needlessly convoluted code accreted over five years by developer teams who clearly never knew what one another were working on. It was a bloated resource hog that demanded more power than a lot of computers then could handle. But even worse, the company knew it had a shoddy product on its hand and threw together a shoddy, last-minute promotional campaign to go with it.
When Microsoft released the betas for Vista, there was a lot of excitement about it. It was the first new version of Windows in half a decade, after all, and folks were excited to see what new innovations the OS would display. Basically, a shiny new interface and some GUI enhancements. But even though the expectations of many beta-testers were let down, the OS still seemed like it would be a decent product, provided, of course, that MS spend the time to debug the damn thing properly—something the company is not known to do. Well do I remember all the problems folks were having with XP when it first hit the market. But Microsoft’s philosophy has always been “Release it and we’ll patch it as we go along.” When you’re dealing with something as complex as a general-use operating system, that’s not necessarily a bad approach—if your initial release that people are actually going to pay for is stable enough and usable enough to be worth the investment.
Vista wasn’t. The version of Vista that went to manufacture in late 2006 was barely a release candidate, let alone an actual stable release. A lot of people complained that Vista just wasn’t worth the amount of money Microsoft was charging for it: after all, it didn’t offer that much more than XP already did—but every version of Mac OS X since the very first hasn’t really introduced anything revolutionary to that OS, and people still lined up for Tiger and Leopard even though they were merely incremental upgrades too. Vista immediately got a well-deserved bad reputation for being a clumsy bug-ridden dud.
It isn’t anymore. If you buy a new computer with Vista on it today, you’re getting a stable, decent operating system. Microsoft has finally patched and sutured and kludged it to the point where it’s just as usable as XP was in its heyday.
But thank the gods Microsoft has learned from the Vista mess. As soon as they realized that Vista’s reputation as a product as irrevocably tarnished, there were two things they could do: attempt to rehabilitate the product via patching and a new promotional campaign, and/or plan for its successor. Smartly enough, they did both…even though the rehabilitation campaign—the ridiculous “Mojave Experiment”—did more to prove that Vista was a black sheep than reform its public appearance. Fortunately, that rehab regime has resulted in a stable, good version of Vista to keep consumers happy until the follow-up OS is released. Fortunately, they’re doing that follow-up right.
Just a little over a year since MS first announced that they were actively working on Windows 7, I’m writing this using Microsoft Live Writer, which is running on the public beta of Windows 7. Of course, being a beta, the OS has problems still—I’ve had to install almost all of my drivers in Vista compatibility mode, for instance (but I fully anticipated that), and there have been a few stability bugs here and there. It’s definitely not ready for Prime Time yet.
But it sure as hell is close.
Even though there are, naturally, bugs in the system, the beta is almost entirely feature-complete. I’m sure some more stuff will be added by the time it goes gold, but the Windows 7 beta offers beta testers and early-adopters a chance to play with and test drive a lot of new features. Windows 7 is ultimately built on the same basic code structure as Vista, but 1) its developers have cleaned up the code and tightened the resource requirements considerably, and 2) the OS is full of notable advancements. I love the new icons-only taskbar, for instance; the compacted system tray is really useful, too; and the OS is packed full of reliability and troubleshooting utilities—many of which debuted in Vista, and have since become absolutely indispensable to me.
Excitement about Windows 7 has been growing since the first technical previews were demonstrated over the summer. This OS is clearly a step up from Vista, and an even bigger step up from XP. Microsoft has been releasing new screenshots, new demonstrations, and new information concerning the OS every chance it gets. Instead of hiring a million monkeys to pound on a million typewriters (or VT-100 terminals), the Microsoft development team has banded together tightly to release a lean, mean, fully-integrated machine full of neat new stuff…and Microsoft’s PR department has been busily letting the world know about it. After the Vista fumble, MS has rediscovered its focus. I’m surprised Ballmer didn’t come out on stage at CES this year chanting “WIN-DOWS SEV-EN! WIN-DOWS SEV-EN! WIN-DOWS SEV-EN!” Because that’s prettymuch exactly what the company is doing.
And it’s working.
The public beta offering on Friday was originally scheduled to be capped at 2.5 million downloads, but it’s clear now that way more than 2.5 million copies of the beta are going to be DLed. And that’s not counting the copies that are already being traded on BitTorrent. This is a beta release done right. With this amount of beta exposure, Microsoft will have a unique opportunity to test out their new OS on a huge variety of machines doing an even larger variety of tasks. Every window in the beta has a convenient Send Feedback link in the upper right corner, and the feedback application that it links to makes it very easy to talk back to the development team, so consumers can not only report bugs but request new features and comment on others. If Microsoft even takes a tenth of those reports to heart—and I’m betting they will, considering how dedicated to this project they appear—then by the time Windows 7 goes gold (almost certainly this year rather than the original projected 2010 date), they may very well have their first revolutionary, rock-solid release since Windows 95.
So, if you’re a Windows user, are you doing your part to help MS shape and polish this beast? If you have a spare computer lying around, give it a shot. It’s 100% free! Here’s a nifty overview of the new OS’s most salient new features courtesy of The How-To Geek, and here’s a guide to setting up a convenient dual-boot Windows Vista-or-XP/Windows 7 system courtesy of Lifehacker. I highly recommend installing Windows 7 on its own partition so you can easily switch back and forth from a stable version of XP or Vista and the beta because, like I said, this sucker still has some warts and holes in it. It’s not production-quality yet, but it will be soon enough!
I’ll report soon on the features of Windows 7 that I really like, once I have a few more days to test drive it and kick the tires.
*Seriously, never buy M-Audio products. They are the Ford of the computer-music world.
Google Chrome: Good.
September 5th, 2008
Everyone knows by now that Google’s finally thrown its own offering, Chrome, into the Great Second Browser Wars. It’s been called “soft, yet elegant” and a “smart, innovative browser” and everyone everywhere is crowing about everything from its simplicity to its speed. Sure, there was a little craziness about Chrome’s EULA, but that’s been taken care of. If you’re reading this, though, chances are you just want my take on the browser. Well, here it is! As a nod to Chrome’s absolutely-no-nonsense, no-frills approach to the browser’s interface, I’m going to restrain my usual logorrhea and deliver a nice, calm, minimalist review.
The GUI is incredibly sparse, but (like all Google products) quite intuitive: tabs, back and forth buttons, a stop/reload button, a bookmark star next to the URL/search bar, and two control buttons (one for page-related activities like opening new tabs and printing, and one for browser preferences). No menus. No titles. That’s it. It’s the browser equivalent of a Mondrian painting.
Whenever you open a new tab, the default home page shows you nine of your most frequented sites (somewhat like Opera’s Speed Dial) plus a list of recent searches. Also, new tabs display your bookmark bar, which you can also select to have shown at all times. When you mouse over a link, its URL appears in a little pop-up line in the lower lefthand corner of the window. And, of course, it’s got your usual pop-up blockers, cache clearers, etc. Nothing revolutionary, just handy.
When you download a file, its download progress pops up at the bottom of the tab. Chrome’s downloads manager opens up a new tab in which all recently downloads are listed by date. Cool.
I particularly like the “Omnibar” that combines Google search with the traditional URL bar so you can easily search Google and your own browsing history at once. Again, nothing earthshaking here, just neat.
Now here’s the really impressive shit.
Google Chrome is very fast. Pages render with lightning speed and JavaScript executes smoothly and quickly. The WebKit HTML engine and v8 JavaScript engine are top-notch. But big deal, right? Firefox renders pages quickly, too, as does IE8 and Opera—and the new JavaScript framework Mozilla has been working on for Firefox will be just as good, if not better, than v8. But what makes Google Chrome so neat is this: each tab, each JavaScript process, is run in its own processor thread.
What’s that mean to non-geeks? Simple: if a JavaScript or plugin glitch makes a tab’s processes choke, only the tab closes, not the whole browser. Now, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 implements this as well, and I’m sure Mozilla will be doing the same shortly too—but neither IE8 nor Firefox 3 have built-in process managers that let you track individual tabs and individual JavaScript engines’ memory usage and stability. Yes. Chrome has its own Windows-style Task Manager.
Don’t think that’s cool or useful? Try opening it up the next time Chrome seems to be acting really slow or some page doesn’t want to reload. You’ll be able to recognize the problem and axe it without causing any of your other Chrome tabs or windows so much as a shiver.
So, yeah….Google Chrome is good. Damn good, in fact.
But it’s not great. Not yet, that is.
The version of Chrome available right now is prettymuch just a proof-of-concept beta. An initial offering to publicly test some new concepts and technologies. It works great—hasn’t crashed on me yet, and I’ve been running it for two days, loading it up with tons of tabs containing everything from Flash games to extremely Ajax-heavy webapps.
But it’s limited. It presently offers no extensibility aside from support for common plugins like Flash and Shockwave, but Google has announced that the browser will support extensions like Firefox soon. In fact, I’m betting it will probably support any and all Firefox extensions, or at least Google will release an API to make it easy to port FF extensions to Chrome.
And they’d better not prevent developers from offering ad-blocking extensions. Or that will kill their browser before it even has a chance to grow. Google text ads are fine by me, but if I can’t click an annoying Flash ad and say, “Go the hell away,” I’m jumping ship without a second thought.
The tab bar definitely needs work, too. Whereas FF3 will allow tabs that do not fit all on one screen to scroll, Chrome merely makes tabs smaller and smaller as it tries to squeeze more and more into the row. Eventually, they turn into nothing more than tiny white peaks with little X’s in their corners. Hint: copy Firefox’s scrolling capability.
A little more polish, a little more user-end functionality would be nice, too, but I know that will be coming soon enough.
Nonetheless, for being an early technical beta, Chrome is quite polished. It works great. It’s stable as can be. I’ve been using it almost exclusively for three days now. I really like it.
In a few months, once more functionality—and, even more importantly, more support for functionality—gets added…I’ll probably love it.
I haven’t been this excited about a stupid browser since I first discovered Firefox’s 0.1 beta years ago. Chrome manages to capture the minimal aesthetic of that ancient Firefox progenitor and add an HTML/v8 framework to it that makes it perfectly suited for today’s interactive Web.
In fact, I would recommend this beta—this right-out-the-door, slapped-together first-run beta—to any web user, novice to expert, who wants a faster, more stable browsing experience. Yes, it’s that good already.
So yeah. Way to go, Google guys! But you’ve still got stuff to work on. Quite fuckin’ around with Picasa and get down on it.
[Errata: Is it just me, or does the Chrome “ball” logo look like a Pokemon sphere? “I choose you WebKit!” *Peewwww-p-p-peww-pewwwwww!*]
Technorati Tags: google,chrome,google chrome,browser,windows
All Things Pegritzian…and I do mean ALL Things!
August 31st, 2008
Here’s a quick heads-up for fans of all things Pegritzian: I’ve just started a tumblelog over at Tumblr.com.
“Jesus, Pegritz,” you say, “why the hell do you need another freakin’ blog? You’ve already got this one, plus your Footnotes to the Human Species thing, your NONFICTION! thing, and that Oneirophrenia site you never update…not to mention countless others that even you forget that you have!”
Well, here’s the cool thing about having a Tumblr log: it acts as an aggregation site for the RSS feeds of all my other sites. Whenever I post something new here on PEGRITZ(.com)!, a link to it with an explanatory excerpt is automatically posted on the tumblelog. Whenever I post a new chapter to a story over at Footnotes to the Human Species or any other site, the same thing happens. Anytime I update any of my sites, links to those new updates will technomagickally appear as links on the tumblelog! It’s basically a one-stop shop for all things Pegritzian—and, best of all, it has its own RSS feed. In essence, subscribing to the tumblelog feed is like subscribing to all relevant Pegritz-related RSS feeds at the same time.
But wait! There’s more! Tumblr.com also provides a nifty little no-nonsense interface for posting Random Junk, like cool quotes, pictures, links, and…hell, just about anything else you can think of. This is not the kind of material I’d post on, say, this blog or on Footnotes because I don’t like to clutter up content that I regard as more important or relevant to a site with random videos of cats doing silly things, links to amusing articles, miscellaneous pictures and other such errata. But I still like to share that kind of information with folks who enjoy little tidbits of weirdness along with more substantial content. So, not only will the Pegritz tumblelog index the meatier content of my primary sites, it’ll also serve as a dumping ground for the assorted, individually-wrapped chunks of mind candy that I’m constantly stumbling on around the ‘Net.
So, hey…if that’s your kind of thing, or you’re just trying to tidy up your RSS feed collection, then enjoy The Collected Works of Derek C. F. Pegritz.
Technorati Tags: tumblr,tumblelog,rss,pegritz
This post courtesy of ScribeFire.
June 15th, 2008
Over the last few years, since starting my very first WordPress blog–the one you’re reading right now, in fact–I’ve used a number of different methods to post content to WordPress: everything from WP’s built-in editor (both WYSIWYG and straight HTML) to a number of different third-party tools. My two favorite methods have been WP’s own editor, of course, and Microsoft’s stunningly useful Windows Live Writer. MS gets a lot of flack–a lot of it warranted–concerning the company’s less-than-stellar support for web standards and even lessER-than-stellar web tools (uhhh, Windows FrontPage, anyone?). But not only has Microsoft finally taken steps to fix its “web image” by producing Internet Explorer 7 and the Dreamweaver-trouncing Expression Web, it’s made up for a lot of sins with the very popular and almost universally-applauded Live Writer.
One of the posting apps I’d tried and discarded in the past was the Firefox extension Performancing. It was very simple, very easy to use, and very basic…too basic, in fact: it lacked support for a lot of WordPress features or writing methods that I used frequently. Now, several years later, the extension has been renamed ScribeFire, has undergone a great deal of development, and is drawing better reviews than ever. So, I thought I’d take a second look at the browser-based publishing platform and see if it gives Windows Live Writer a run for its money. In fact, I’m writing this post in ScribeFire as a means of testing it out!
In short: though ScribeFire has some very nice features and has grown by leaps and bounds since it was known as Performancing, the same damned limitations that turned me away from it before are still freakin’ there.
First, the good. A single click on the ScribeFire icon in the Firefox status bar brings the blog editor right up, and one can also right click anywhere on a webpage to “Blog this page,” bookmark the page using del.icio.us, or load up more info about the page via Technorati. The post editor now supports multiple tabs so you can work on several entries at once, and, of course, features both a WYSIWYG and HTML editor. Some cool additions to the WYSIWYG editor are the “Insert a special character” button which allows you to add áççèñtëð characters of various sorts, plus buttons to let you directly insert graphics from Flickr and videos from YouTube.
The interface is divided into two panes: the left for composing, and the right for such things as selecting which of your many blogs you want to post to, setting categories, and so forth. The neatest feature of the right pane is that it provides you with a list of the last fifty-or-so post you’ve made to your blog, which lets you quickly copy titles and URLs if you do a lot of referncing other entries on your blog. The right pane also allows you to easily insert Technorati tags to an entry and enable pings to services like Technorati and Ping-O-Matic. The left pane also features a “Promote” tab which lets you share pages via such popular social-media sites as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine, and even Facebook.
So, in regard to those various tools, ScribeFire has come a looooooong way. Any blog editor should give users extended character support (I mean, how many actually know the “&whatever;” codes for things such as M-dashes, etc.?), and the entry catalog is no doubt a godsend to cross-referencers.
But.
Now, keep in mind, the following is 100% subjective. Chances are, if all you need is a simple program that lets you conveniently publish stuff to your blog, ScribeFire is just as good as Windows Live Writer or, for that matter, WordPress’s own editor. My needs, however, are a little more specialized. They’re not extremely outré or rarified by any means, but there are certain things that I look for in a blogging program that ScribeFire has never had and, probably never will.
One is an easy way to remove hyperlinks. See the link to del.icio.us a paragraph of two above? It doesn’t need to be there. I simply made that link to see whether I could easily remove it. By removing it easily, I mean that I should be able to click a single button or do a single simple action to remove it. Right-click a link in Windows Live Writer and you’re presented with an option to remove the link. Highlight linked text in WordPress’s native editor and click the link button, erase the URL from the popup window, and the link is gone. Those are actions as simple and as quick as highlighting text, clicking the link button, and making a link in the first place.
However, removing links in ScribeFire ain’t that easy. One way to remove a link is to switch to HTML view and remove the <a> tags. If you highlight linked text and just click the link button and simply erase the URL text, the link will remain after you click OK. That’s just stupid. Another way to get rid of a link is to highlight the linked text and click the “Strip formatting” button. Wait–a link is considered formatting? Ummm, technically it is…but how many of you think “link” when someone mentions “formatting?” Italicized text, font face, size, and color changes, indents, etc…everyone will recognize that as formatting, but links? Yes, the “Strip formatting” button is right next to the “Add A Link” button…but there’s a divider between the two. The “Strip formatting” button is in its own little section with “Increase Font Size” and “Decrease Font Size” buttons. There’s no visual or semantic reason to associate “Strip formatting” with “Add A Link.”
Also, ScribeFire’s WYSIWYG editor is extremely clumsy. Unlike literally every other WYSIWYG editor on Earth, including WordPress’s own native Tiny-MCE-based WYSIWYG editor, you can’t italicize text by hitting ctrl+I, or bold by hitting ctrl-B. The only way to italicize text is to highlight it and click the “Italicize” button. And here’s where it gets weird: the “Italicize” button uses oldskool HTML <i> tags, rather than the more common XHTML <em> tags…but there is another button further down the bar that lets you “Emphasize” text with <em> tags. That’s just needlessly confusing.
Finally on the tag/formatting front…everytime you start a new paragraph, ScribeFire doesn’t automatically add <p> tags. Strange.
Scribefire also does not support WordPress excerpt text, and, apparently, doesn’t publish Technorati tags even when you add them. I am editing this paragraph in WordPress itself after having published the post, and…well, you don’t see any of the usual Technorati tags at the bottom of this post, do you? That’s a BIG strike in my book.
Oh, and one last thing. Yes, this is a very niggling little matter, but hey–I use the M-dash a lot. It’s part of my style. But guess what character the “Insert a special character” button does not give you access to? Every other imaginable character is featured but that one. EDIT: Apparently, WordPress itself renders the oldskool “two-hyphen” method of representing an M-dash as an actual M-dash. Huh. Well, I guess you learn somethin’ new everyday….
Ultimately, it’s silly oversights like a missing M-dash character, a missing “Remove link” button or something similar, and the utterly needless separation of <i> and <em> tags that just make ScribeFire seem like a cheap, hastily-thrown-together app. Yeah, it’s free…but so is WordPress itself. And Windows Live Writer. You can do so much more, so much more easily with those other apps that ScribeFire just comes across as limited and–even worse–limiting.
But hey…if your needs are simple–and I do mean simple–then ScribeFire may just be the blog-poster-thingee you’ve been looking for!
The Fat Lady Slims Down and Runs 1,000 Yards on First Down!
May 29th, 2008
Firefox v2.whatever was a total waste of bytes. It was a notoriously bloated memory and processor hog, and just an all-around piece of crap. Nonetheless, it was my browser of choice mainly because of its extensability: common extensions such as Web Developer, MeasureIt, ColorZilla, AdBlock Plus, and Greasemonkey alltogether made the browser extremely useful for a webdesigner like myself, and made my everyday browsing experience much better by blocking annoyances and enhancing content. Unfortunately, I began to use Firefox less and less over time because of its innumerable memory leaks (which its developers stupidly claimed to be a “feature” rather than an obvious flaw) and its pathetic performance. In fact, I was ready to give up on it.
So when the first beta versions of Firefox 3 came out, I immediately jumped on them, thinking, There’s no way on Earth that Firefox 3 could be as bad as 2. The lads and ladies at Mozilla were announcing that Firefox 3 was going to be a vast improvement over 2. New features were going to be added to give the browser more functionality by default, but a great emphasis was going to be put on fixing the browser’s flaws. Yeah, right, I figured. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Well, I saw it. And now I believe it.
Firefox 3 (currently available as a Release Candidate) is everything that Firefox 2 wanted to be—in fact, should’ve been—and more. I’m not even going to mention its new bookmarking system or other new interface elements, all of which are meant to be subtle, enhancing the user experience in simple ways; in this article, I simply want to focus on the functionality of the browser itself.
First off, memory usage has at last been curtailed. Firefox still uses up a substantial chunk of memory (generally about 200mb to 300mb), but has never gone above 300mb in either Windows XP or Windows Vista, even with two windows and at least 45 tabs open. Memory usage in Vista is actually somewhat better than XP, but regardless of which Windows OS you’re running, you will notice a significant levelling of Firefox’s memory usage. As I loathe both Linux and Macs, I haven’t been able to test FF 3’s memory usage in a *nix or OS X environment, so I encourage any Linux or Mac users reading this to post a comment indicating FF 3’s memory usage; I’m curious to see how it runs on those systems. I’ll bet that its resource profile is the roughly the same in Linux or OS X, because one of the main goals of the developers on the Firefox 3 team was cross-platform stability.
Firefox 3 is much easier on the ol’ processor, as well. I haven’t noticed any processor spiking since Beta 2, which was a bug eliminated by Beta 3. Even with a variety of extensions, FF 3 is still better on both memory and processor resources than its predecessor.
Firefox 1 was a truly revolutionary application, and rightly began to chip away at Internet Explorer’s pathetic dominance of the browser world. Firefox 2, however, was a de-evolutionary step that no doubt inspired Devo to begin recording again. Firefox 3 is a true evolutionary iteration of the browser.
So go n’ get it already. Even if you’re not the kind of person who likes to jump on pre-release versions of software, I highly recommend upgrading to Firefox 3 if you are an FF 2 user. And if you’ve never used Firefox before, then by all means, check it out now! Even with Internet Explorer 7, and beta versions of IE8, finally showing that Microsoft gives a damn about web standards and user security, Firefox 3 is still a superior browser that will let you do everything you want to do on the Web (and then some) without bogging down your computer.
ME, Two? The Sins of Windows Vista
April 16th, 2008
One year ago today I was happily using Windows Vista. I had even written a few times on this very blog hyar that all the alarmist bullshit being flung around about how Vista eats up all your computer’s resources and is so full of DRM it won’t even let you play a CD unless you have a signed and notarized affidavit from the copyright holder was all just that: bullshit. Last year at this time, the only problems I was running into with Windows Vista were application incompatibilities…but you just expect that kind of thing to happen when a new OS is released. I did notice, however, that a lot of the early complaints about Windows Vista were coming from audio enthusiasts and computer-based musicians, who were mentioning all manner of driver problems. Creative and M-Audio were the two companies receiving the most criticism concerning driver problems, but the beta driver I was using to make my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum work under Vista didn’t seem to be giving me any problems….
It is now one year later. On Monday, I wiped Windows Vista off of my computer and replaced it with the default installation of Windows XP that had come with it. It took that particular copy of XP about two hours to download all the hundreds upon hundreds of updates that it needed to get caught up, but once it was fully updated and I’d spent a few more hours reinstalling all my software and copying my data back from its temporary exile on an external hard-drive, I’m happy to say that I am rockin’ and rollin’ (and bloggin’ and cussin’) more effectively than ever once more.
“So, Pegritz?” you ask. “What finally killed your love of Vista? I mean, just a few months ago you were still saying that it was a perfectly serviceable OS and that the many people calling it a waste of time and a major mistake for Microsoft were completely full of shit. So, what gives? Did you catch Vista doin’ your girlfriend or something?”
OK, then—here’s your answer.
Let me begin by reiterating a few things I’ve said a few times about Windows Vista. First of all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the OS from a usability point of view: despite a lot of bitching and moaning about “Oh, they moved my Command Line shortcut! Those horrible bastards!”, the GUI is no more nor less accessible than that of Windows XP. In fact, I prefer it a lot to XP. Not only is it better looking, but simple things like the list of “favorite” folders visible in every Explorer window makes it so easy to keep data nicely organized by keeping all your most-used folders a single click away. It doesn’t take six video cards, each with a gig of memory apiece, to run Aero with full transparency effects. Vista did not run one bit slower than XP on my machine, and actually started up faster. Finally, I never once ran into any form of DRM- or protected-media-related problems because I do not own or use any DRM-encumbered media, period.
So what’s so wrong with the OS that I don’t want to use it anymore? Let’s see:
SIN 1: AUDIO.
The first and most serious problem with Windows Vista is entirely related to audio. You think inferior NVIDIA drivers caused a lot of Vista crashes? You should see Creative’s track record. To put it mildly, audio in Windows Vista sucks. Big time. Though Creative’s beta Vista drivers for my SoundBlaster X-Fi worked just fine, their official Vista drivers are completely nonfunctional. They would work for anywhere between five and twenty minutes before crashing with a horrific !!!SQUEIIEIEIENK!!! that nearly destroyed my speakers and scared me so badly a number of times I nearly shat my pants. I would then have to reboot the damned system to enjoy another five-to-twenty minutes of good sound before OHMYCHRISTWHATTHEFUCKWASTHATHORRIDSCREECH?!!?! Oh. It was Creative’s useless fucking drivers blooching again. Between April 2007 and March 2008, Creative has issued at least five, or maybe more, revisions to their Vista X-Fi drivers. Guess what? Not a single one of them worked with my X-Fi. Not one. I attempted to ask what the hell was going on at Creative on their discussion boards, but never received a reply of any sort. I finally discarded the X-Fi card after Creative pulled the ultimate boner by asking a fan who actually made functioning Vista drivers for the X-Fi to cease and desist. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never own another Creative product.
I eventually purchased an M-Audio MobilePre USB audio system because it was portable (it connects via any plain ol’ USB port), it was much higher-quality than the X-Fi, and it featured a number of inputs to let me record live instruments into my computer. Of course, the reputation of M-Audio’s Vista drivers is not much better than Creative’s, but the MobilePre USB came highly recommended and, even better, was cheaper than any other audio solution. In fact, it was so cheap I even could afford to purchase two studio-quality monitors to go with it! When I brought it home, I downloaded the Vista drivers from M-Audio’s website, installed them, and plugged the MobilePre in. Worked like a charm. Until, that is, I had to reboot the computer for an unrelated issue a few days later. Vista would not recognize the device. I had to uninstall and re-install the driver, and then it worked again. Great, I thought, I’m gonna have to do this every time I reboot the damned machine? I contacted M-Audio to ask about that. Their answer: All of our Vista drivers are betas (STILL?! After the fucking OS has been in the marketplace for over a year?), and, besides, none of them support Vista SP1 yet.
Wait a second. As far as I know, Vista Service Pack 1 has nothing at all to do with the OS’s audio system. Why the driver would work under Vista but not Vista SP1 is completely beyond me but, hey, I’m not a programmer. Either M-Audio is incredibly lax when it comes to writing drivers, or Vista’s new audio subsystem is harder to parse than a Klingon translation of Finnegans Wake.
Audio hardware under Vista was not my only cause of grief, however. Audio software was even worse. Cakewalk Sonar was the first (and, to my knowledge, still the only) major DAW that released a version capable of running under Vista…but “capable of running under Vista” and “running well under Vista” are too completely different things. Fortunately, my alltime favorite audio workstation, Renoise, worked just fine under Vista…provided that I had User Account Control shut down completely. For some reason, none of my VST plugins would work on Vista if UAC was turned on (as, by default, it is). Needless to say, UAC was turned off immediately and never turned back on. I have no need for a goddamned operating system to ask me again and again and again if I’m sure I want to copy something.
Ultimately, though, between hardware problems and software problems—neither of which are present in XP—I finally decided that it was time for Vista to go. One of my primary uses of this computer, after all, is music production. It’s why I bought this particular machine in the first place: it had plenty of memory and a super-fast dual-core processor so I could run lots of effects! But…with Vista, it just got to a point where I do that anymore.
SIN 2: WEIRD INSTABILITY.
ANY pre-SP1 Microsoft OS has problems, because Microsoft always, always rushes stuff out the door before it’s actually ready. Considering it took five years and extensive beta testing to get Vista ready, though, you’d think the bugs would’ve been fewer. Nonetheless, they were there. But no big deal. Bugs happen, and after a month or two of working with Vista, I’d grown to know those bugs pretty well. Subsequent Windows updates even eliminated a great deal of them.
Yet…Vista was always a shaky system, regardless. Every now and again, it would do something extraordinarily weird—so weird that I could never be sure whether the problem was a hiccup in the OS, a user error, or some kind of demonic possession. For instance, every now and then I’d get what I took to calling a “sour boot”: for whatever reason, Vista would boot improperly—certain startup programs wouldn’t start up, certain services wouldn’t start, and Vista would then either run very slow, its processor usage would spike at odd times, it memory usage would go through the roof, or the OS became next to unresponsive. One time, when I got a “sour boot” (just a few weeks ago), I attempted to open Firefox 3 beta 4. It took twelve minutes for Firefox to load. I know I keep a lot of tabs open, but DAMN! That’s a little excessive.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the many times my temperamental audio player, J. River Media Jukebox, suddenly stopped working or played mp3s backwards.
The only way to get Vista back to working normally was to reboot and hope I didn’t get another “sour boot.” At first, I used to get them only once in a blue moon. By January, though, I was getting “sour boots” at least one in ten times. By March, it was happening almost every other time I restarted the damn machine. This, along with a few other issues, was something I was hoping SP1 would get rid of. But it didn’t. Which brings me to Sin Numero Tres:
SIN 3: SP1 MADE EVERYTHING WORSE.
I remember fondly when Windows XP SP1 was released. I didn’t really know what a “Service Pack” even was, then (I don’t remember there being Service Packs for Windows 98 or ME), but I installed it and…Windows XP just kept working like it always did. Windows SP2, on the other hand, did show some marked improvements in the system. Needless to say, I was pretty hyped for the release of Vista SP1, which I figured would solve a lot of the various “rushed-to-market” bugs and issues. I should’ve known something was up when Microsoft kept pushing the release of SP1 back further and further and further….Finally, though, it arrived, and I installed it.
The number of odd instabilities—random program freezes (that would last up to two minutes before the program would just come back to life), crashes, strange error windows, and, of course, even more audio problems—that had been making the OS more and more annoying to use in the past few months TRIPLED. It was like SP1 literally made the OS more unstable than ever before.
One of the great Vista irritants that I was hoping and praying Vista SP1 would correct would be the interminable file-copy or file-moving times. I frequently move large amounts of data from one external drive to another (for example, when I’m backing up my sample library or all the music I’ve composed). Try moving 15 gigs of data with pre-SP1 Vista. Oh, look at that: the little copy windows is telling me that it will take 1 hour and 45 minutes to move 15 GB of files. “Oh, pshaw,” you think, “it can’t take that long. XP used to give weird copy-time numbers too.” But look at that…it really did take Vista 1 hour and 45 minutes to move 15 GB of data. This was a well-known Vista headache and SP1 promised to fix it.
Well, it didn’t. In fact, as I was moving all my digital photos and documents to a safe external drive prior to wiping Vista out and replacing XP, it took nearly four hours to move 69GB of data. I guess that fix wasn’t actually included in SP1.
Regardless of the copy-time issue, the sheer frequency of instabilities and problems increased noticeably after SP1 was installed. Thank the Other Gods I didn’t have any problems installing SP1, as many others did…but, unfortunately, though SP1 installed successfully, it only seemed to make things worse.
SIN 4: GETTING PROGRESSIVELY WORSE INSTEAD OF BETTER.
The final sin of Windows Vista is sort of a metasin, being a sin comprised, in part, of all previous sins. When I first upgraded my old computer to Windows XP way back in 2001 or ‘02, I noticed a few bugs and problems here and there in XP that Windows 98 didn’t have. Regardless, XP was a HUGE improvement over 98, and a VAST improvement over Windows ME. As time went on and Microsoft added hotfixes and patches to the OS, its performance got better and better. Today, after greater than half a decade of refinement, Windows XP is a tank. Everything runs just fine on it, and weird problems are rare.
I expected the same experience from Windows Vista. Actually, I even expected it to be a little worse with Vista, because the difference between Vista and XP was so much greater than the difference between XP and Win 98/ME. Nonetheless, when I first installed Vista, I was impressed: it really ran pretty well, and the various audio and application problems I experienced with it would eventually vanish as better drivers were produced, Vista-compatibility issues were worked out. That’s just how it went with XP, after all!
But…no. Rather than getting better, as the months wore on, my Vista experience grew progressively worse. Applications seemed to develop more problems. Hell, I couldn’t even get the Beta Version of Internet Explorer 8 to install on the damn thing: it would copy all files and finish the installation, but the second I clicked on the IE button to open the browser the program would instantly crash.
The file-copying problem got worse and worse.
I even began to have trouble with Renoise—the most trouble-free piece of software I’ve ever owned! I would click on the Samples folder to access my audio files…and every single hard-drive attached to my system, either internally or via USB or Firewire, would grind and grind and grind for about three minutes before the list of sample folders would finally appear. Renoise never did that on XP! In fact…Renoise had never done that on Vista, either. Until I installed SP1.
A lot of people have been comparing Windows Vista to Windows ME, the strange, buggy, half-assed successor to Windows 98 that generally stands beside Windows Bob in the Microsoft Hall of Shame. I used to laugh at such comparisons. ME was a thousand times buggier than Vista, and its performance actually worsened as time went on. In fact, one of my friends at Laurel Computers in Uniontown once told me that the only way to keep ME running okay was the completely reinstall it every two to three months.
It didn’t strike me until Monday, when I was thinking about reinstalling Windows Vista again to get rid of SP1 that…I had reinstalled Windows Vista at least four times, every two to three months. That was the only way I’d managed to keep it running smoothly. By the end of that two/three-month grace period, something weird would happen that would kill the OS’s effectiveness and then I’d have to reinstall it.
Wow. Could those comparisons actually be right? Is Windows Vista merely ME 2?
Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t have a test machine anymore that I can install Vista onto to see how it works on a different computer, so I can’t independently verify that. Perhaps someone reading this would like to let me know about his or her experiences with Vista. Are you experienced “ME Two” behavior, or has it been smooth sailing from Day One? Inquiring nerds want to know!
But anyway, there you have it: the reasons why I gave Vista the boot. I have been running all of my software just fine on XP these last few days, and haven’t discovered any discernible problems. None of the weirdness I experienced in Vista is happening under XP. The problem obviously lay with the OS, and not with my hardware (which I was actually beginning to suspect).
The question now stands: Will I ever return to Vista?
Not any time soon. Eventually, I would really like to, because, quite frankly, I found Vista’s GUI to be perfect to my computer usage style and I liked a lot of Vista’s features. Vista will, eventually, I hope, prove to be a worthy successor to XP…but until the day comes that it can demonstrate the same stability and lack of weirdness that XP actually displayed from Day One, my Vista installation DVD will be tucked in the back of my software shelf, next to an ancient set of Castle Wolfenstein floppies that I keep for sentimentality’s sake and the pencil sharpener I haven’t used in fifteen years.
Technorati Tags: vista,windows vista,vista ap1 xp,windows xp,microsoft,operating systems,problems,headaches
HP’s Upline: Good Idea, HORRIBLY Executed
April 16th, 2008
A few days ago, on one of my favorite sites, TechCrunch, I discovered Hewlett-Packard’s new Upline online storage service. I’m a big HP fan, and Upline’s unlimited online storage for just $59 a year sounded like a flatout amazing deal—especially since hard-drive crashes in the past several years have cost me well over $3000 to retrieve vital data from the failed disks. I immediately signed up for the Upline “Home” plan for $59/year, created an Upline account, and downloaded the Upline client. Wooyeah! I was ready to upload everything from my entire mp3 collection to all my documents, every musical track I’ve ever written, and even my vast sample library…to a place where it would remain safe even if the Magneto were to bust into my house and destroy all of my external backup drives with one gigantic kilogauss “Fuck you!”
Yeah, well, that’s when the trouble started.
At the time, I was running Windows Vista Home Premium on my home computer, the HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania Mainframe (an HP m7580n). Installing the Upline client went smoothly, but after the client had been running for a few minutes, scanning over the folder that I had selected for backup, the client just…vanished. I’d gone to the ‘fridge for a drink and when I came back, it was just gone. We’re talking Natalee Holloway Gone here: no traces, no crash warnings, nothing. Puzzled, I restarted it, and it again needed to go through its initial account set-up procedure (none of that info had apparently been saved the first time), then once more started scanning for files to upload. This time, it got as far as beginning to upload the files. After only 1gb of data had gone “up” the “line”, the client again…*POOF*. This time I witnessed it with my own shocked widdle eyes: both client windows, the large detailed one and the little “basic” one that appeared above the system tray just disappeared.
This time, thinking some kind of serious shit was happening, I consulted my computer’s event logs. Both Application and System logs showed no crash alerts or even informational entries related to the Upline client. It simply would not stay active for very long. And when it decided it was finally time to catch a bus to Reno, it slipped away from my desktop as quietly as a cat in the night, leaving no traces of any ill activity behind.
I immediately reported this via email to HP who, after a few bounces back and forth providing outputs of my System/Application logs and some other technical info, responded that
There is no known issues with upline application with VISTA home premium 32 bit. You could either try clean boot to troubleshoot the issue .
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135Also if you have different computer you could try on that and see whether upline application is shutting down.
Now, I have been having more and more strange problems with Windows Vista over the past few weeks than I’ve ever had before, so I figured this was just yet another Vista problem. (My frustration with Windows Vista had been growing since October, and SP1 had actually made many of the problems, mostly of an audio nature, worse than they’d ever been—but I’ll post about that later.) I decided that the camel’s back had finally broken. My patience had finally worn out. It was finally time to “upgrade” back to Windows XP, which I did today. I restored the original XP installation to my computer and, after cleaning out the usual crapware, installing a few hundred updates, and just generally tinkering around with various settings to make sure everything was the way I liked it, had a nice, clean, perfectly stable Windows XP environment running.
After copying my personal data (y’know, all the stories I’ve written, Cthulhu pr0n I’ve downloaded, and illegal XviD rips of Andy Griffith) into XP’s “My Documents” from their temporary exile on one of my external drives, I decided it was time to set up and configure Upline once more—hopefully without any goddamned, weird-ass Vista craziness.
Instead, guess what? I experienced even stranger problems. Twilight Zone problems, people. Seriously. Witness:
To begin with, the installation crashed twice. Never a good sign. I finally got the client to install, however, and entered my account information and selected folders to back up once again. The familiar two Upline windows appeared and the client began scanning the files in the selected folders, just like before. It was chugging along just fine when—wait for it—my monitor went black. Black as the depths of the interdimensional portal at the heart of the Event Horizon. The computer was still running, and the hard-drive was still grinding as if it were being indexed, but…the monitor was in power-down mode. It’s power light had turned orange and NO DVI INPUT was flashing on the screen. Now let me tell you…I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life. Not even when I had a video card go bad. All that happened that time was the screen resolution went wonky. It didn’t turn into a gateway to the Chaos Dimension.
So I pulled the plug on my computer and restarted it. Once it restarted, the Upline client launched automatically at start-up and—you guessed it—I had to input all the login information, select folders, yadda yadda yadda. I was thoroughly sick of the damn thing by this point, but “Hey,” curiosity said to me, “Lessee how it fucks up this time!” Well, this time the screen didn’t blank out, and the client finished scanning, but when I clicked the Backup button the client froze. Froze up like you’d just thrown its processor thread into a vat of liquid nitrogen.
To cut a long story short, I attempted to get the client to work precisely six more times. Four of those times, it froze the second I clicked Backup (and could not be shutdown by any means short of killing the process in the Task Manager [interesting sidenote: the client was using upwards of 300MB of memory each time the process had to be killed]). Twice more, it made my monitor/video-card/what-the-hell-ever completely shut down and blackness, the vile blackness of complete unknowing, prevailed once more.
Needless to say, I called to cancel the service and demand a refund. Prior to this, my experience with HP products and services has been top-notch: I’ve never had any trouble with my desktop or my laptop (both HPs), nor with my printer/scanner, nor with any of the software or drivers I’ve ever gotten from HP. Anytime I’ve ever contacted HP Customer Service, they were incredibly helpful, too—and they were this time, as well: the lady whom I spoke to on the phone took down all of the information needed to refund my payment via PayPal and even provided me with a case number to consult to ensure my refund is received. HP Customer Service is excellent. Too bad their Upline client, however, is a total piece of shit.
To sum it all up…HP’s Upline sounds like it could be a really amazing service. Only $60 a year to back up literally all your data? That’s serious value there, folks. But not if the software client you need to get your data up that Upline can’t even stay afloat long enough to tally up a single folder’s worth of Microsoft Word documents. Pathetic.
HP, if someone one of your tech people gets wind of this blog entry, listen up: I will gladly repurchase an Upline Home Account again if you can prove to me that your client isn’t some half-assed hunk of schizophrenic code anymore. If you get the goddamn thing to work—and by work I don’t mean “work every now and then” but work as well as the drivers to my Photosmart C6280 All-in-One printer/scanner/toaster thingee do—then I’ll gladly hop back on board.
Because right now, I can’t afford to buy 500gb external hard-drive to backup still more data onto. I’ve run out of USB ports! I have a USB hub plugged in to another USB hub and I still don’t have enough damn ports….If USB ports were dollar bills I’d be a…a…well, I’d have enough money to buy another USB hub at Staples.
The Biggest Farce in the History of the World
April 9th, 2008
You may wonder why I haven’t been writing much about DRM or Big Media. You may even miss my vitriolic rants against the sheer, mind-boggling stupidity of the recording industry and my anarchist Internet beliefs….
But the simple fact of the matter is: the RIAA, the entire recording industry (both in America and abroad), and the MPAA—Big Media in general—have made such a pitiable laughingstock of themselves that I simply ran out of vitriol. Spewing righteous hate at those industries is almost meaningless now, as they have shamed themselves so dramatically in so many ways that I literally haven’t a thing left to say about them.
What the hell can I possibly say about that? It’s so ridiculous it has literally left me speechless. And do you people have any idea how incredibly difficult that is?!
Any Air-Heads Out There?
January 27th, 2008
Is anyone Out There in Internet-Land considering picking up a MacBook Air this week when they officially go on sale? If so, do consider answering the following question(s):
Why, exactly, are you buying a MacBook Air? What do you plan on doing with it?
Among my circle of friends, no one, even the few people I know who really like Apple computers (god knows why), are planning to buy one because none of them have a need for, or even the extra cash to spend on, a MacBook Air. Personally, I cannot envision any possible reason that someone would to spend so much money on such a limited product—hence the reason I am asking for any and all positive responses to the MacBook Air!
So tell me…what makes the MacBook Air appealing to you? Are you drawn to it only because it’s the latest must-have toy from Apple, or do you have specific computing/portability needs that can only be met by an ultrathin notebook? Is there some feature of the MacBook Air which you see as particularly revolutionary?
Technorati Tags: macbook air,apple,notebook
What ho! Hath the Fat Lady Sung?
May 19th, 2007
Well. It’s finally happened: my patience with Firefox has run out.
When Firefox first came out, it was a lean, mean, web-browsin’ machine that, even as a very preliminary beta-release, was stable, had a reasonable resource footprint, and ran like greased lightning. Installation was a zip–literally: you just unzipped the Firefox archive you downloaded into a folder, doubleclicked Firefox.exe, and there you were, browsing away. Compared to the lumbering, gout-ridden monstrosity that was Mozilla, Firefox was a fleet-footed Mercury that leapt to action in less than a second and could load even the most edemic, graphics-laden website in an eyeblink. Best of all, it was quite standards-compliant–unlike Internet Explorer 6, which still holds the title of Most Retarded* Browser Ever. I loved it. It was simple. No-frills. It did only one thing–browse the web–and it did it beautifully.
All non-necessary functionality was offloaded to extensions that users could choose to install if they wanted to expand their browser’s abilities. What a great idea! I could customize the browser any way I wanted to, adding the much-needed capability of downloading a PDF instead of just opening it in another browser window through Acrobat Reader, while eschewing functions useless to me (such as a browser-based spellchecker).
Firefox was, quite simply, the best web browser I ever used. When it finally went “official” with Version 1.0, I was ecstatic–especially since a vibrant web community had grown up around it. Not only did its community help it gain ground rapidly in the browser marketplace (initiating World Browser War II), thereby making it nearly mandatory that fewer and fewer websites be “Internet Explorer only,” but there were hundreds of coders Out There making new extensions for it. The possibilities were endless!
Of course, Firefox’s greatest strength–its customizability–was also its greatest weakness. Many extensions were poorly written, suffering everything from rampant memory leaks to browser-destabilizing code errors. It was generally easy to avoid these bad extensions, though: if you posted a dud to the Extensions Library, you’d be savaged by the Firefox community until A) you took the damn thing down, or B) fixed it. Everything was great.
Until Firefox 1.5 came out. Suddenly…Firefox wasn’t so sleek and slim anymore. I’ve always been one to keep a great number of tabs open at one time, which naturally demands a sizable amount of memory–but why, I wondered, could I keep, say, 25 tabs open with Firefox 1.0 and use up about 100mb of RAM…yet those same 25 tabs in Firefox 1.5 used 390mb of RAM?! That’s when I first began to hear about Firefox’s unchecked memory issues. Some said it was a memory leak; some said it was all because of badly-coded extensions and plugins; the Firefox developers had the gall to actually call this bug a “feature” and try to forget it ever existed.
Nonetheless, Firefox 1.5 might have become a serious resource hog…but it still worked great. Once I upgraded my computer to 1gb of RAM, Firefox could easily suck up 500mb of memory without impacting other programs. I was still annoyed by the massive memory usage, but the browser still worked. Every now and again I’d add an extensions which, for some reason or another, would create instability problems, but those situations were always easily solved.
And then Firefox went 2.0. That’s when the true suckage began.
I have never liked Firefox 2.x. Even without a single extension added, it’s slow, it’s full of built-in features (like that goddamned spellchecker) that I have no use for whatsoever, and it’s riddled with problems. Periodically, it spikes my processor usage to 100% for no recognizable reason. It gobbles up nearly 700mb of RAM on my new 2gb computer. Every extension I add–even something as simple as a bookmark toolbar alphebetizer–increases its resource footprint exponentially. I’ve dug deep into the user chromes to tweak every possible setting that might A) increase performance or B) decrease incidences of craziness…yet, day after day after day, Firefox behaves more and more and more like its predecessor, Mozilla Suite.
Quite frankly, I’ve grown sick of it. And, apparently, a lot of others feel the same way.
Recently, Wired Magazine posted an online editorial concerning the growing dissatisfaction of many Firefox aficionados with the progressive bloating of the once-simple browser. I am now adding my voice to that clamor: Firefox has outgrown itself. It is the browser equivalent of the hot babe with the smokin’ physique who lets herself go and ends up a fat, frowsy fussock after a few years of comfortable marriage.
And that’s just what’s happened: Firefox developers have grown too comfortable with their product. It’s now officially recognized as a world-class browser. It gave Internet Explorer 6 a solid beating and effectively overthrew it as the “default” web browser, so much so that the latest IE actually incorporates many design concepts that originated in Firefox. Firefox has proved itself a worthy contender…so now what? In order to remain a contender, feature creep has set in.
Feature creep, for those unfamiliar with the word, is
a tendency for product or project requirements to increase during development beyond those originally foreseen, leading to features that weren’t originally planned and resulting risk to product quality or schedule. Feature creep may be driven by a client’s growing “wish list” or by developers themselves as they see opportunity for improving the product.
Stuff starts out simple, then progressively grows more complex, mainly because it’s a common human trait to let things spin out of control. The more people you have on a project, the more likely feature creep will be, as everyone wants to plug in his/her/its own little design concept or idea to the mix. (Considering how many people are currently working on the Firefox project, it’s positively inevitable.) Feature creep just happens, no matter how hard you fight against it–and it is not necessarily a bad thing! Feature creep has actually been good for Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, for instance: it forced the Sloth of the browser wars to bootstrap itself up to at least the level of Firefox 1.0. In order for Firefox to remain ahead of IE, it’s only natural that its designers will want to include more and more “out of the box” functionality to make the browser a genuine alternative for average users who just want to install a piece of software and start to use it without having to worry about further extension installations and whatnot.
But feature creep is bad for Firefox, for two reasons: 1) it’s expanding the nature of the browser far beyond the original goal of the projects which made it so awesome; and 2) it’s distracting programmers from debugging existing code. Firefox at its core was meant to be nothing but a web browser; and and all further functionality–like spellcheckers, RSS readers, password managers, etc.–were meant to be offloaded to extensions. These functions do not need to be native to the browser itself. Include features that “out of the box” users need, yes, but keep that to a bare minimum. Plus, why bother adding a friggin’ native RSS reader to the browser when no one has yet been able to solve the memory-hogging problem?!
Firefox 2.0 is a damn mess. The end. It just does not work for shit on Windows, and apparently, works even worse on Macs. My buddy Jeremy, who runs it on his Ubuntu install, swears that Firefox works perfectly fine in a desktop Linux environment–but desktop Linux is, and always will be, nothing more than a hobbyist’s OS. The vast majority of desktop and notebook computers in the world run a Windows OS or Mac’s OS X: Firefox’s Linux support is ultimately irrelevant–if the damn browser runs like a dog on Windows and OS X, how will it ever be able to properly challenge Internet Explorer and Safari?
I have been reducing my Firefox usage every day since the week Firefox 2.0 came out and all the problems began to surface. I have run Firefox under Windows XP and Windows Vista, and though the program runs marginally better on XP, it’s still far too problematic for me to deal with on a day-to-day, pokin’-around-the-web basis.
Recently, I’ve found myself using Opera 9.2 a lot more. Which surprises the hell out of me. Opera–the Little Browser that Could–has finally begun to prove itself a viable alternative to both IE and Firefox. Only took ‘em 9 versions to get it right…but I digress. Heretofore, I’ve found Opera to be damnear useless for a wide range of reasons. Originally, it was because it was the only browser you had to pay for. Pay to use a web browser? Insane! I’m not about to use some piece-of-crap adware just because it has a faster rendering engine than Internet Explorer! But Opera wised up, and now the browser is 100% free. It’s also full of really useful features–like a built-in BitTorrent client, a password manager (natch), and it’s new Speed Dial function, which lets you keep an index of nine commonly-used web sites always at hand for easy loading. Opera has definitely seen feature creep…and yet the browser at most uses approximately 150mb of RAM and no more to keep twenty, thirty, forty tabs open at a time.
My biggest problem with Opera has been that very few “Web 2.0″ AJAX-laden websites work with Opera. Only within the last month or so have Google apps begun to work properly under Opera, for instance. Considering that the majority of the web is headed toward expanded AJAX functionality, well…that leaves Opera dead last in the browser race. But they’re catching up! I’ve found more and more Web 2.0 websites support Opera all the time (and vice versa).
If Opera 9.2 is any indication, it could very well begin to make inroads on even Firefox simply because it’s a truly healthy alternative. As Firefox grows fatter, Opera just becomes more muscular.
——
*In the most literal meaning of the word: “Occurring or developing later than desired or expected; delayed.”
——
Technorati tags: firefox, opera, browsers, bloat, wired
