2005 • June • 14

Two unrelated quick thoughts

Because it bears repeating, here's something I just wrote in a comment:

I think the problem now is that, after having used a Palm III with a Novatel Minstrel wireless cradle like 7 years ago, I expect flying cars by now :)

I also later got a Minstrel III, but I can't even find a picture or a link to the nasty brick that was the original Minstrel for Palm. Also, I hacked together a gnarly cable to use the Minstrel with my Sony Vaio 505TR laptop running Mandrake Linux so I could work/play in coffee shops in the pre-wifi days.

Back then, I really wanted to get deeper into wireless and mobile tech--but I never got the big bucks to buy many toys to do it on my own, nor managed to meet anyone in the know. And these were pre-blog days for me, so of course I hadn't yet caught on to blabbing thoughts like these out into the ether.

I still want to do more with mobile tech, though. So, Russell, let me know if you ever need to hire a researcher! :) (Or if anyone else needs a researcher, for that matter.)

Month-old tabs in Firefox now. Remember when I was bragging about that in OmniWeb? Greasemonkey is what finally dragged me back--and SessionSaver and Flashblock have kept me put, for now.

Now, if only I could get a vertically-oriented tab bar with scrollbar working in Firefox.

Archived Comments

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah

2005-06-15T11:45:31

How about those favourite deal breakers in Firefox that keep me on the Mozilla Suite on half of the machines I use? 1. Control+Q or Cmd+Q is not mapped to Quit as in Mozilla and Netscape 2. No site navigation bar I truly believe that the site navigation bar with Top, Up, First, Previous, Next, Last buttons and the Document and ubiquitous "More" folder that listed alternate links such as different feeds on the page is a breakthrough in the browser interface (albeit an incremental one) much like the back button. The site navigation bar is much maligned (and was pulled from an early Mozilla release circa 1.3? "because of its effect on page load performance" before it was added back after an outcry and those "performance" issues were addressed. Still the default setting has it always hidden, you have to go find the "Show only if needed" option in the menu. I quite like the next and previous buttons that appear on some blogs (and used to appear in Slashdot - although they disabled that because of concerns about link pre-fetching. For those of us in the Long Tail of the blog world that site navigation bar really works well for navigating the site. And it pulls me out of Bloglines for many sites when I want to just lazily surf around. If we could standardize a few more primitives beyond the Top, Up, First, Previous, Next, Last buttons there could be lots of interface innovations and the navigation of web sites could be made easier. In the Atom working group there was talk about standardizing various linking primitives in this manner. The fact that this is all hyperlink mediated is strangly appropriate. Now it is only the pull of Monkeyed Grease and inline autocomplete that keep me turning to that foxy thing, otherwise Luddite and late adopter that I am, the Mozilla suite is where I would stay. hmm worthy of a blog... lessee http://www.bloglines.com/blog/amaah?id=38
l.m. orchard

2005-06-15T11:55:42

Koranteng: I think I'm a little confused what you mean with #1... In my copy of Firefox for OS X, Cmd-Q is indeed the shortcut for "Quit Firefox". But, as for #2, check out the Link Toolbar extension for Firefox, which reintroduces the link navigation buttons in the lower right of the window: http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/linktoolbar It is a shame that this isn't a part of Firefox out of the box, since I agree that these header links are great for all the reasons you mention. I've tried to include them in pages on this blog, too, although I think they need some work. Oh, and by the way, hi there. I've been thoroughly enjoying your blog for a few months now, thanks for stopping by mine! :)
Koranteng

2005-06-15T14:20:39

So I should have Switched back then... On Windows (all versions) Ctrl+Q does diddly squat in Firefox. I had seen the link toolbar extension a while back but didn't install it on my Firefox machines for some reason (the toolbar being located on the bottom perhaps) and there was some gotcha if I recall. But thanks for the reminder, maybe I'll do the one-click install thing... Also a head nod to you also, love your stuff, there's a shared Axis of Jaundice that we're perhaps members of. Let's hope we stay below the radar of those unmanned predator drones... As they say: Lights Out ;-) or even perhaps let's go with Monday's story http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/06/manhole-explosions-in-central-square.html
Adam Keys

2005-06-17T17:10:11

I switched back from OmniWeb on account of Greasemonkey as well. However, speed was also a big issue for me. OmniWeb was using *huge* amounts of memory when I had more than 10 tabs open. Even more so if I had the page previews turned on. Firefox fixed that and gave me a lot more toys to play with.