Download Day

Allegedly, today is Download Day, when Firefox 3 is released and they try to get the largest ever number of people all downloading it at once. So after 6pm, go grab a copy!

Getfirefox.com
EDIT: try here instead:
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/

If you don't already use Firefox, you should give it a look. V3 is smaller and faster than before.

If you use Internet Explorer, then I strongly advise you not to. It's insecure - v7 is not great, v6 and earlier are very bad - and it's poor at things like blocking advertisements and so on. Really, seriously, don't use IE. Get Firefox.

If you're an Opera user, well, fair enough - v9.5 of that just came out, so it's worth a look too. For me, though, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, Firefox is a more pleasant tool to work with.

In other news...

After a couple of hours' wait in the Whittington Hospital in Archway this morning, it emerges that I might be able to get a nose job done soon. Not a cosmetic one, but having it straightened so that I can breathe through it again, and, I hope, get more than a vestige of a sense of smell.

This may mean that I spent a few weeks with a plaster-cast on my conk, though. If so, I may not go out much. I fear considerable ribbing.

More cheerily, since I've recently got paid, I have treated myself to a new toy. My first new laptop in about 3y: an IBM Thinkpad X31. It's a tiny little subnotebook, but with a proper screen and keyboard. Big bigger than an Asus Eee or the like, but rather more than twice the power, memory and vastly more storage. And yet, cheaper than an Eee. £200 from SterlingXS. Very useful place for cheap end-of-line kit and the like, Sterling. Recommended.

I've also got a rather barking bicycle, on a sort of approval/evaluation loan thing from Tim Kirk up in York, to whom my thanks. One of these:



Getting it back from King's Cross, via Waterloo and a train to Wimbledon, was hairy. I'm a fairly experienced recumbent rider - I've ridden as many as I can get a go on, over 13y now - and I can barely steer the thing.

Alas, it's too big to fit into even the boot of an estate Mondeo Jaguar, so I couldn't get back home from Brighton, meaning that I couldn't do the London to Brighton ride on it as I planned on Sunday. Rather a big disappointment, but probably sensible - it needs adjusting for me (I'm rather leggier than Tim, though, given his choice of bike, a great deal less brave). I also need to change the pedals - he uses a different model of clipless shoe to me.

I'm looking forwards to getting used to it over the summer, but it's one seriously scary machine. You're beneath car bonnet level. Not an ideal tool for use in traffic!

The Third Fox

So you've upgraded to Foxy Three and it's all lovely and shiny... But. You had some essential add-ins or extensions that you simply can't live without, and they don't work in FF3.

Well, all is not lost. Here are a few things to try.

[1] Go look for the latest versions yourself and manually update.

For instance, one of my favourites is Linky. Great tool, but it's not been updated in some two years. Its author may have abandoned it, but others haven't - this is one of the benefits of open source, of course. There's an updated version here, on the German owners club for the Smart Roadster sportscar, bizarrely enough. (There's something else I want, too.)

Similarly, my oldie-but-goodie version of BugMeNot wouldn't update, as apparently it didn't do secure updates. I manually grabbed v1.8, installed it and all's well - and indeed now it's updated itself to v2.0.

Definitely worth a shot.

[2] In some cases, you might need to change to a different extension which does the same job.

An indispensable tool for me was Google Browser Sync, which keeps a copy of all my bookmarks, passwords, browsing history and so on securely encrypted in my Google account. However, the search supergiant has, for inscrutable reasons of its own, decided not to continue with the project. GBS doesn't work in FF3 and never will.

So, it's time to switch. The Mozilla organization has its own cross-machine sync project, Weave, but it's still at version 0.1 which might be a tad immature for some.

All is not lost, though, for there is Foxmarks. Backed by famed developer of Lotus 1-2-3, Mitch Kapor, it's a third-party repository for bookmarks, complete with free sync tool. They have plans to use our collective favourites to build some kind of super search engine, so maybe in time they will be the Anti-Google.

[3] If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again. If it still doesn't work, cheat.

Although Fox 2 and Fox 3 look very alike, under the skin, the differences are considerable. Some FF2 extensions just won't work with FF3. Some, however, get disabled just because they don't say they'll work with FF3.

As it happens, you can force FF3 to not check that addins are compatible. This may get some working. It's not a long-term solution, but it may bridge the gap for you.

[4] And finally...

One of the few things I really don't like about the Foxy Three is the full-page zoom function. I never liked it much in Opera, either. About twice a year, it's handy for trying to inspect some small illegible image; the rest of the time, it just makes pages look blocky and ugly, to me.

But you can turn it off: look under View | Zoom in the menus, and down at the end you'll find an option called "Zoom Text Only". This makes it work like FF2, Internet Explorer (eeeuw) and most other browsers.

Lifesaver for we old codgers with failing eyes who just want more readable text.