So Firefox 3.0 was released recently. I downloaded it today to see if it was worth upgrading from 1.5 (I skipped 2.0 entirely - too many annoyances for me).

The verdict thus far is, as I used to say when I was 15, “big negative on that one”.

I really don’t see much happiness in the future of Firefox. What I see is yet another great piece of open source software going drastically downhill in an attempt to “reach out” to a wider user base - meaning a dumber user base.

There is a delicate balance between making an app so unusable that nobody downloads it (even though you, as the developer, might find it plenty useful) and making an app so dumbed-down that anyone, including a computer-illiterate 90-year-old, can use it. This is particularly a problem with open-source software.

I’ve been a big fan of how Microsoft does things. I’m sure I’ll get blasted by “real geeks” for saying that, but the fact is, Microsoft’s products cater to everyone - from the stupidest of the stupid users to the most advanced power-using geeks out there. While there are certain things that Linux indeed does better, Windows meets all of my needs as a power user - and all of my mother’s needs as someone who only uses the computer for email and the occasional game of Spider Solitaire.

In the case of OSS, it’s too easy to either make a product really dumbed-down or really complex. This is more or less what happened when Gaim was released as Pidgin several years ago. Since then, Pidgin’s development has gotten drastically more user-unfriendly in an attempt to make it more accessible to people who would otherwise avoid unfamiliar software. In the case of Pidgin, as “features” were added (which translated into actual features being removed, hidden, or dumbed down) and the user base got wind of the changes and requested fixes or reversions, the developers unfortunately were not too interested in listening to their users.

Firefox is a much bigger open-source project compared to Pidgin, which makes me wonder if they’ll be less likely to listen to their users - or more likely because they have such a public presence now. It’s hard to tell, really.

Surprisingly, Firefox 3.0 has made an effort to behave more like Internet Explorer - I tend to believe it should be the other way around. The oversized back button just gets in the way - who even uses the back button anymore? Ctrl+Left is a heck of a lot faster when navigating your page history.

Not only that, but, like IE7, FF 3.0 has condensed the history into a single button. Rather than having arrows next to both back and forward so that you can navigate in either direction in a tab’s page history, it’s all been shoved into a single button. Does this actually increase usability? I tend to think not. When you’re doing a lot of heavy browsing (and lord knows I do that enough), you don’t want to try and work with one list for all your page history - it’s easier when it’s split between what’s behind and what’s ahead in your page history.

The new drop-down URL bar is ridiculously obnoxious. I Googled around a bit to see what others thought, and there’s a pretty clear consensus so far - the new auto search is annoying, frustrating, and at times unusable. While I’m sure there are people who only remember URLs by title, I don’t. I know the actual URL. When I type in “sla” to go to slashdot, I’d rather not have it start throwing back search suggestions and entries from my history or my bookmarks. If I want to find a page in my history, I’ll hit Ctrl+H and search for it in the History sidebar.

I would imagine that this particular problem, given how many people already dislike it, will be fixed soon with an extension.

Then we come to the feature that I was most interested in - memory management. I am a tab addict. On any given day, I’ll generally have between 20 and 40 tabs open in a single Firefox window. On top of that, each tab has enough browsing history that I start to quickly suck up any and all available physical and virtual RAM as Firefox attempts to cache my history in RAM. After a few days of leaving my workstation at Purdue up and running with Firefox open, I’ll look in the task manager to discover that Firefox is using 500MB of RAM (out of 2GB) and another 1.2GB or so of virtual memory. Closing tabs doesn’t fix the problem - the cache is still there. Killing the process entirely and starting over is the only way to free up memory.

I haven’t really put FF 3.0 through the wringer yet on this one. However, in running the same general activities in 1.5 and 3.0 today, both were using almost identical amounts of physical and virtual memory. It’s not a good sign so far, but I’ll have to really do some hardcore browsing to see if 3.0 is actually an improvement over previous releases.

So far, 3.0 has not impressed me. The only feature I’ve seen so far that I liked was the ability to make it remember to always allow SSL certificates with mismatched domains - at work, our development environment’s SSL certificate doesn’t match the server’s URL. It gets annoying to get that “are you sure you want to do this?” popup every time I login (particularly when the login has to expire after an hour). Being able to set it to always authenticate without needing an extension is nice.

Other than that, though, I think I’ll be sticking with 1.5 for awhile longer, much like I’ve been forced to use older versions of Pidgin to compensate for the fact that the developers appear to be writing the application into its grave.

I have friends all over the world. Once in awhile, I make use of the various webcams I own and do a little video chatting. Getting video chat to work well will be for another day - something I learned recently, however, was how to setup a live stream on a webpage. It was surprisingly easy, and works in both Windows Vista and Windows XP.

You need three things : a webcam, a decent high-speed internet connection (the lowest end DSL might not have enough bandwidth to support this well), and Windows Media Encoder, which is available for free from Microsoft. If you’re running Vista, there’s a hotfix you might need (it’s linked on the main WME page), but I have yet to have any problems myself.

You might also want to get a dynamic IP service, like dyndns or no-ip. I used no-ip.org, although they seem to be really big on sending me frequent emails advertising their paid services - I’m not a big fan of free services spamming me about their commerical options. If you don’t use a dynamic IP service with the computer running the webcam, you’ll have to manually update the webpage every time your IP changes.

We’ll walk through how to get setup and going. It’s a bit screenshot heavy, so click the jump to see the rest.

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I just finished up a review of the Asus eeePC 4g (701) for Julie over at The Gadgeteer (check it out here). Before i finally got around to writing that review, I hadn’t done a whole lot with my eeePC. Since last night, however, I’ve installed Windows and started looking for ways to make my eeePC as functional as possible.

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You know, for all the flak our friends in Redmond get, I’ve seen Microsoft release some pretty decent stuff lately.

I sometimes wonder (ok, so I wonder a lot…) if people have a habit of immediately discounting anything from the hands of Microsoft because, well, it’s from Microsoft. Perish the thought!

Anyhow, I’ve more recently become a regular user of two well-known Microsoft products: Windows Vista and an 8GB Zune. I can still remember when the Zune first came out - it was mercilessly destroyed by critics everywhere as a pathetic attempt to compete with Apple’s flagship iPod products. At this point, anything that plays movies and music is going to be an iPod competitor, period. It’s hard to create something that can validly stand up against the number one digital music player on the merket.

At any rate, I’ve been writing reviews for Julie Strietelmeier over at The Gadgeteer for a few months now. She asked me to review the 8GB Zune, and I’ve been using it ever since. I’ve even gone so far as to mention to her several times how much I like the thing.

You can read the full review here - it’s a bit long, but it’ll be easier than me repeating myself in this post. Why do I really like the Zune? It just works. Seriously. I turn it on, and it works. There’s almost zero learning curve. The up-and-down motion of the touch-sensitive D-pad (wow, that was a lot of hyphens) is easier on my thumb than the scroll wheel on my fourth generation 60GB iPod photo. It fits in my back pocket. Battery life is phenomenal - I only charge it about once a week, and I use it every day. It looks sexy as hell.

The software leaves a little (or a crapload) to be desired, but the latest revision (2.5) fixed several of my top complaints about the usability of it. I’d like to see MS give us Windows Media Player compatibility. Overall, though, what can I say? I really, really love my Zune. When my iPod finally dies on me, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be replacing it with a Zune. Of course, this means my iPod alarm clock will no longer be very useful, so I may have to keep around an iPod just for that.

Epiphany - now I know why people are against buying products specific to a single device. I mean, everyone was thrilled when all the major cell phone manufacturers announced they were going to a single standard for charging (micro-USB), right? It’s too bad that all these music devices can’t use a single standard for docking, remote controls, alarm clocks, video output, etc. I’ve got too much iPod hardware as it is. I’ve looked into how difficult it would be to create an adapter to use my iPod stuff with my Zune - it doesn’t look overly complex, but would require some more knowledge about the Zune’s pinouts (what’s available now is far from solid data). Getting charging and syncing to work is one thing, but getting other signals to work - remote controls and other docks, specifically - is another beast. I’ll add that to my ever-growing list of summer projects.

I’ll save my commentary on Vista for another day. Right now, I’m more interested in figuring out how to add timestamps to WordPress posts.

Every once in awhile, I like to peruse Sourceforge for new, interesting open-source applications. I was looking for a good screenshot application several months ago, when I was working on writing help documentation on a project at my job. I’ve since found out that the help documentation software, Adobe RoboHelp, includes a very nice screenshot manager called RoboScreenShot. This application, however, is not free, and I’m always interested in finding good open-source or freeware alternatives to commercial software. I have been in need of a small, open-source application that allows me to quickly take and save screenshots of applications, particularly since I’ve started writing these articles.

Enter Greenshot. This is a very small, quick application that allows you to take three different types of screenshots: your entire desktop, a selected window, or a selected region. Taking a cue from the application’s name, selections are highlighted with a translucent green region to show what you’re screenshot will contain. The application is small and fast, and allows you to either copy your screenshots to the clipboard for pasting into another program (for instance, PowerPoint or Word), or save it to your computer in JPEG, BMP, GIF, or PNG format. There are also limited annotation features, but I’ve found that this application is most useful when needing to send a picture of part of your screen to someone quickly and easily.

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Here it is. I finally got around to installing Wordpress.

Now, before you judge me for not using a more advanced CMS/blogging engine, or writing my own template for this thing, allow me to speak on my own behalf.

I work full time, and at the moment I’m trying to finish a web application by 9:00 AM tomorrow. I don’t really have the time to do much advanced stuff with this right now.

I’ll get around to writing a proper introduction at some point, but in the meantime, there’s this:

My name is Claire. I’m a girl, I’m 23, and I work at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN as a web developer. We mostly work in Adobe ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server, although some stuff is done in PHP or ASP.NET (ew), and minimal stuff is done with MySQL instead of MSSQL.

I already have a personal journal (no, you can’t have the link). I’m hoping that I can use this for something a little more about the real world. We’ll see how it works - historically, trying to manage two blogs doesn’t work, at least for me.

Welcome!