More website stuff

[Aaron]

Hello,

Firstly, I'd like to apologise to the visitors with 800x600 screens or smaller, as I've upped the page width to ~1000px. However, as about 98% of visitors now have a screen resolution of 1024x768 or greater, I thought it was a bit silly to keep the narrow page width any longer. If you've got a nice new browser like Opera, you squish it all back into view by changing the page zoom to 80% (all browsers should have that feature!).

Avatars - I've finally uploaded a few avatar sets to the forums. If you're into pop-culture you may well be disappointed though, as I removed all the boringly common ones (i.e. Neo/Trinity/Morpheus/Aragorn/etc), and what's left is pretty eclectic (hats, hello kitty, etc.). If you don't like the selection, you're free to upload your own images.

Validation - Everything except the forums and the wiki are now valid XHTML 1.0 (phpBB2 and DokuWiki don't validate, sadly). The upshot is that most of the site will load a bit faster, as your browser can parse XHTML documents more quickly than HTML (which is a sloppy, hard-to-parse standard). Of course, if you're using IE you won't notice a difference, as it handles XHTML as HTML (Grrr!).

Links - I've added a bunch of links to the 'useful links' page in the wiki (link below). Please feel free to add more if you can think of them. If you want to link to your own project, that can be done on the projects page.

Links: http://www.bundysoft.com/wiki/doku.php?id=links
Projects: http://www.bundysoft.com/wiki/doku.php?id=projects

RSS - I've updated the 'quick guide to RSS' page to cover how to read the RSS newsfeeds for L3DT (eg. news page, forums, etc) in your web browser, though not IE of course, which doesn't support RSS. The link is here:

http://www.bundysoft.com/wiki/doku.php?id=tutorials:rss


Buttons - My shipment of glassy green buttons has arrived (see side-menu). They still look a bit wonky in IE (surprise surprise), but I'll be fixing all that in the next day or two. Also, the 'back to top' button doesn't float to the bottom of the page in some browsers (i.e. non-Firefox), but I've worked out a solution that I'll be applying shortly. After that, I think I'll leave the website alone for a little while and get back to 'real' programming.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

[JavaJones]

So where's the "Get Opera" button? Firefox is nice and all, but Opera is so clearly superior.

- Oshyan

[Aaron]

Hi Oshyan,

Good point. I'll do that shortly.

In other browser-related news, I've just downloaded and tried IE7 beta. As far as this site is concerned, it seems to render everything consistently with Opera and FF, which is a welcome relief. On the downside, it still doesn't have an XHTML parser, so it won't render well-formed pages as fast as other browsers. Also, I note that IE7 still does a fairly shambolic job of the Acid2 CSS test:

http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html

Of course, Opera and FF don't pass the test perfectly, but the output does at least resemble that which is expected. What does this mean? I guess sites that use fancy (yet 'valid') CSS tricks will still need to be hacked for IE, which is a little disappointing. No great surprise, though. I seem to recall an IE developer blog that said MS is more interested in implementing new features IE than they are in making it comply with the World Wide Web Consortium standards. It's their call, but it seems that other browser-development teams can do both quite successfully.

While I'm ranting on IE7, I must take a moment to decry the train-wreck of a user-interface. Whoever told them to get rid of the menu really should be flogged at the stake; every other application has one, because it’s a logical way to order options. Everyone is used to menus. Menus are good. Instead, they’ve dispersed the menu options amongst a bunch of dropdowns launched from toolbar buttons. So it's like a menu, except broken up all over the place. If it looked good I might forgive them, but it doesn’t. It’s ugly.

While I'm on a run; the installer is over twice the size of FF/Opera, and it requires a reboot for no good reason. Grrr.

I sincerely hope that the beta bares little resemblance to the final release.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

Edit: Wait, I found how to turn the menu back on, but it pops-up beneath the toolbar. Were they smoking crack or something?

[Aaron]

Hello,

Ooh, I just found a good feature with IE7. The built-in RSS feed reader is prettier than Opera's (though I certainly had trouble finding it without the menu). I haven't played with it enough to know whether the feed management is better or worse, but it does look pretty solid. So, chalk one up for IE7.

Oh, one more thing, IE7 beta overwrites your IE6 install. Just so that you know.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Hinklemister]

Sounds like they've almost downgraded for IE7. I don't plan to get it anytime soon because FF is just so much better. Maybe I'll try Opera some time though.

[Aaron]

Hello,

Sounds like they've almost downgraded for IE7.

Maybe. I'm not sure it's possible to be worse than IE6, but they are certainly exploring their options. This is a beta however, so I would expect some of the more outrageous "features" to be fixed before the final release.

Maybe I'll try Opera some time though.

It's definitely worth trying. There's really no question in my mind that Opera is the better browser in the out-of-the-box configuration right now. It's faster to open, smaller in memory, it looks better, it has a *good* built-in RSS reader, it has that funky zoom feature, bookmarking is better, and there are probably a few other things I can't think of right now. Most of these are coming in FF 2.0, mind you, but they're not here now. However, you can pick up quite a few nice features by installing extensions for Firefox. Opera will still be better at some things, but there are also things that FF extensions do that Opera doesn't. Coincidentally, I've just written a little review of some of the better Firefox themes and extensions, if you're interested:

http://www.bundysoft.com/wiki/doku.php?id=reviews:firefox_themes_and_extensions

Cheers,
Aaron.

[JavaJones]

Unfortunately adding the necessary extensions to get much (but not all) of Opera's functionality just makes FF load even slower (Opera already loads faster even without FF plugins!). I also find that FF gets cluttered really easily since you can't easily customize *exactly* what each plugin adds. With Opera you have most if not all of the functionality you'd want, and little or nothing more. Even better most of it is designed in such a way that it can pop out of the way when not needed, which is super slick. Opera is just overall a more smooth experience and it's clearly better designed. They also seem to come out with major updates faster than FF. Opera 9 is already in alpha if not beta. We'll probably see Opera 9 before FF 2, and that trend may just continue.

All that being said I do wish Opera had a better true plugin system though. Although it includes most of the functionality I want by default, it's always nice to be able to expand things, and if it did include such functionality all the FF extension hackers would have another outlet (and a better one IM). Plus the FF proponents would have one less piece of ammo against Opera.

Btw if you're looking for good FF extensions, this thread on the Donation Coder's forums might be of interest (may need to sign up):
http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/ ... 5.0?ref=nl

- Oshyan

[Aaron]

Hello,

It looks like the release of FF2 and Opera 9 will be a close-run race. According to the schedule, Firefox 2.0 Alpha is due on Friday, with the final release scheduled for late June:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox2/Schedule

The 2nd tech preview for Opera 9 is due today, and the final release date is in late June also:

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=122837

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Aaron]

Hello again,

Playing with Opera 9 TP2 now. First impressions:

• Widgets are cool, and maybe even useful. Very pretty in any case.
• Automatically imports bookmarks from FF, IE and Opera. Handy.
• You can add different search engines to the search bar.
• Page source view has basic syntax highlighting (nice for developers).

According to the changelog, most of the differences are in back-end rendering type stuff - including some CSS 3 support, would you believe? Does IE even support CSS 1 properly? Anyhoo, this isn't an earth-shattering, Firefox-obliterating tech preview, but some sensible additions and some pleasant new eye-candy (I'm looking at you, widgets).

Cheers,
Aaron.

[JavaJones]

I must admit I am not really familiar with what FF2 and Opera 9 are respectively bringing to the table. I'm just looking at historical release cycles here and so it would not surprise me if Opera hit its deadline (seems further along in dev anyway) and FF did not. I'm not critiquing the Mozilla org or contributors, just saying that as far as I know Opera has historically been more reliable with release dates.

In any case I can't imagine too much significant stuff that I'd like to see added to Opera besides increasing standards support and compliance and maybe an alternate page rendering method for IE-specific pages (there's an FF plugin for this, I know). Heck for all I know there's an Opera "Panel" addon that somehow does this. So what I'm saying is FF has the longer haul in terms of becoming a product that really impresses me. Opera already does, it just needs to push further into the areas it already excels in.

I *would* like to see a tab navigation function using a miniaturized, tiled set of the tabs (there's an FF plugin for this) though. I'd also like to see a built-in spell-checker for data entry fields at a minimum (apparently this is a planned FF2 feature). But overall a good part of the FF2 dev plan seems to be catching up to Opera http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox2/Features

To give you another example of how cool Opera is, and how far FF has to go IMO (even with better plugin support), using the re-open button for recently closed pages (already exists in Opera, and Avant for that matter, not sure if it's planned for FF2 as part of their revision of the history system), if you open a site you recently closed, it will allow you to navigate *back* from that page to the pages you arrived at that page from. I don't know maybe that's the whole idea of this kind of feature, but I don't think Avant does that, and I found it really impressive - it's keeping track of not only what pages you arrived at and subsequently closed, but also how you got to those pages. Coooool.

- Oshyan

[Aaron]

Hi Oshyan,

But overall a good part of the FF2 dev plan seems to be catching up to Opera.

Okay, I'll bite. You're right of course, but the build plan for Opera 9 also appears to be mostly things that are either in Firefox now, or available by extensions. You can read it at http://labs.opera.com/news/2006/02/07/2/.

To give you another example of how cool Opera is, and how far FF has to go IMO (even with better plugin support), using the re-open button for recently closed pages (already exists in Opera)
...
if you open a site you recently closed, it will allow you to navigate *back* from that page to the pages you arrived at that page from
...
it's keeping track of not only what pages you arrived at and subsequently closed, but also how you got to those pages. Coooool.

Would you believe that the SessionSaver extension for Firefox does this? I already had this one installed, but hadn't noticed this functionality until you brought it up.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[JavaJones]

Ah, I see there's a "thumbnail" feature in Opera 9. Nice!

Tip of the hat to the SessionSaver dev(s) on the "closed page history" function. I think that's a super cool feature. Not one I use a lot I must admit, but when I have found it useful I've been very thankful it's there. Now the question becomes what is the respective resource use of Opera and FF when they're configured to more or less run like each other?

- Oshyan

[Aaron]

Hello,

Indeed, Firefox will use much more RAM to do (nearly) the same thing, in default configuration. Opera is designed foremost to work on mobile devices without much memory, since that's what's paying their bills. By contrast, Firefox is designed for the practically limitless resources of the modern PC. Thus Firefox includes lots of memory-heavy options intended to make browsing faster and/or better.

Extensions are a big offender here. I've got ~15 loaded and the startup usage of FF is ~25Mb, while Opera is <10Mb. However, FF does more for me than Opera, and I'm willing to sacrifice some RAM for those little luxuries.

Even so, it is possible to reduce the RAM-usage of Firefox. Apparently, a lot of the supposed 'memory leaks' of FF come from the session history cache feature, which allows you to navigate back to a recently viewed page without re-loading it (see Mozillazine article, below).

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749.html

You can disable history caching in by going to 'about:config' (a fantastic feature of Firefox), selecting the 'browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers' option, and setting it to zero.

Of course, Opera implements a session history too. However, if the slashbots are to be believed, Opera stores only the HTML, whereas Firefox keeps the parsed and rendered DOM in memory - this is larger (it includes CSS, images, scripts, etc), but it does make it faster to display. Is the difference noticeable? It depends on your browser usage. I tend not to navigate backwards/forwards very much, rather I habitually open everything in a new tab. Thus the fastnav of Firefox is no benefit for me, and I have it set to a low value (2 pages).

I think the upshot of all of this FF vs. Opera argument is that by default, Opera is better, but if you want something that's not default, then you need Firefox.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[JavaJones]

By contrast, Firefox is designed for the practically limitless resources of the modern PC. Thus Firefox includes lots of memory-heavy options intended to make browsing faster and/or better.

Can you name some of these memory hungry features that FF has in default configuration which Opera doesn't? I'm not talking about extensions here. FF is still more memory-hungry than Opera even without them, especially as you open more tabs.

What features from FF do you specifically miss in Opera? I think these things are worth telling Opera devs about. I do have several gripes with Opera mind you. I wish the mail client was optional and/or less tightly integrated (I'm sorry I just don't want my browser and mail tabs intermingling!), and I do wish it had a good extension/plugin system like FF. I also wish they'd stop focusing on features like Bittorrent that are already done much better by other programs (uTorrent anyway? That thing is *genius*). But other than that it's remarkable how much of the stuff I need/want the Opera devs have included by default. That says a lot to me about their ability with UI and overall program design.

As for the history feature, I don't know whether Opera and FF handle it differently, but in actual usage I find Opera at least as fast to reshow previously visited pages, if not faster. So whatever difference there might be it doesn't seem to be making FF better, and Opera does basically the same thing with less memory.

Anyway, I suppose I'd agree that if you have really serious needs to customize your browser then FF is the best option. I just question how many people that really is as opposed to people like me who are indeed power users but who find that Opera does just about everything they want. There are a few features I wish Opera had that FF does, with extensions, but I'm willing to do without them for the much more unified, smoother experience of Opera vs. FF. I guess it's just personal preference in the end, because clearly we want similar things, we just are willing to make different compromises to get it.

- Oshyan

[Aaron]

Hello,

Can you name some of these memory hungry features that FF has in default configuration which Opera doesn't? I'm not talking about extensions here. FF is still more memory-hungry than Opera even without them, especially as you open more tabs.

Hmmm...good question. Thinking about it now I realise I was talking out of my arse. Other than extensions, the only big memory hog that I know of in FF is the aforementioned history feature, which now that I test it is still not as fast as Opera.

So, Opera is faster, and it uses less memory. The former point is good, but the latter is only relevant if you actually run out of RAM using FF. The speed and the RSS support are the main reasons I use Opera - everything else I can get with extensions for FF (and a few things aside). The reason I don't use Opera exclusively is because Firefox gives me nice trinkets like page rank, my local weather forcasts (important in Melbourne, believe me), IE Tab, Cacheout!, etc. Nethier browser, to me, is good enough to make me entirely abandon the other. For most users, however, Opera will be better, as I've said all along.

What features from FF do you specifically miss in Opera? I think these things are worth telling Opera devs about.

Only the extensions, and in most cases these really aren't features that should go into the core of a browser; most people won't want them.

I just question how any people that really is as opposed to people like me who are indeed power users but who find that Opera does just about everything they want.

Not many, I would suppose, and that's just fine.

I guess it's just personal preference in the end, because clearly we want similar things, we just are willing to make different compromises to get it.

Amen.

Cheers,
Aaron.