I downloaded Firefox 4 yesterday (and apparently I’m not alone, Mozilla have already racked up over 7 million downloads at the time of writing) and have been genuinely impressed by a) the speed of opening from a cold start and b) improved page load time.

Of course I’ve not done any benchmarks so I’m not entirely sure how much of this is psychological (ooh shiny new product must be faster, that sort of thing) and how much is actual, but there we go.

My biggest gripes so far:

• Support for browser.tab.tabMaxWidth and browser.tab.tabMinWidth has been deprecated. It took rather a lot of Googling to discover that a) it now needs to be done in userChrome.css and most importantly you need to set browser.tabs.animate to false otherwise you end up with ghost tabs. See: Firefox 4 Beta: Tab width CSS for more information
• You can’t trial personas by hovering over the images on the Persona page now. You have to install, and then remove if you don’t like it. It’s not a major pain in the butt, just a bit of added inconvenience.

Err, and that’s about it. Not bad so far.

What the hell is it with software companies thinking it’s OK to bombard you with additional junk packaged up with their programs already? I finally got ’round to buying Windows 7 for my laptop (after finding it plain awesome on my AA1) so did the whole back-up files, etc and reinstall malarkey yesterday afternoon. This… read full entry »

I finally reached the end of my tether with Linpus on my netbook last week. Although it has the potential to be a nifty, quick operating system, it’s so restrictive that it makes the iPhone look good ;) Despite there being guides detailing how to unlock certain parts, remove unnecessary bloat etc, any power user… read full entry »

As a web developer and general computer geek, I frequently find myself involved in discussions with other devs, designers and power-users over what operating system they’re using. I find myself in a minority, being a Microsft Windows user by choice. This isn’t inherently bad, especially given that the choice of one’s OS can be an… read full entry »

To celebrate my move to a superior operating system (too early for the fangirling?) I hereby release my latest layout. It’s got blue, it’s got ninjas, it’s got icons, a gradient, syndicated feeds… it must be some sort of web 2.0 mish-mash hodge-podge?! I’m trying out some new things with this latest creation. For starters,… read full entry »

I came across uploadthingy.com via Hacker News last week. The idea is that you enter in your domain and a password, and it generates some HTML for you which allows visitors to upload files via your site, except the uploads are sent to uploadthingy. It basically takes away the hassle of having to deal with… read full entry »

While everyone is busy upgrading their WordPress, I spent this morning downgrading Firefox. As most of you will likely remember, I upgraded to Firefox 3 on download day and was “quite happy” with it. The excitement was fairly short-lived, unfortunately. I’ve been having problems with Firefox for a couple of months. I’d close the browser… read full entry »

So, Apple have released a new MacBook: the “MacBook Air”: MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable and ultra … ..pointless? featureless? useless? overpriced? Yes, I totally agree. It is being piped by Apple fangirls and boys everywhere as the perfect tool for wireless communication and work on the go.. which is great, but I can do… read full entry »

Karl and I were talking in the car today about the progression of Windows, the upcoming service pack 3 for XP and the extortionate prices charged for the likes of Microsoft Office. This of course got me started on the benefit of free software, although I don’t know who I was preaching to because Karl… read full entry »

In true chuck-myself-in-at-the-deep-end Jem style, I’ve been fiddling with Ubuntu again because there are certain things I want/need to learn. After spending several hours trying to familiarise myself with all the basic crap, I’ve started downloading some handy stuff that I figured I’d share, along with some useful links. Automatix — Automatix is a graphical… read full entry »