Firefox vs. Opera: Round Two

Today I’ll be looking at usability in both Firefox and Opera. The main concerns I have for a browser’s usability include Cookie and Password Management, Customization, Rendering, and Bugs/Quirks. For today, I will only be talking about cookies and passwords.

Why does this matter?
Seeing as how I’m someone who enjoys the ”set it and leave it” way of doing things, I am very much concerned with how a browser handles my settings. I have a list of sites that I visit often which require cookies to function properly (like Gmail, for example). I have so many accounts (four different ones just for Gmail) and on so many different sites with so many different variations of “johnnysasaki” and “larker” and whatever else I can’t recall at the moment that I do not like sitting there and thinking for a minute or two before typing in my username and password. I also don’t like trying various options before getting it right. This is why I really think cookies and passwords are so important.

Firefox vs. Opera: Round One

As per Herman’s request, I’ve done some very simple tests to get a feel for differences between Firefox and Opera. Two things I’ve looked at this time were Load Times and Memory Footprints. These are completely objective observations and I have not changed/fudged any numbers. How did it go?

Opera 9.22 Int’l

Update: I would be glad to do comparisons between the two on my machine. I’ve been considering that actually, since load up times (for example, of Speed Dial pages) become extremely important for someone who opens new tabs as often as I do. Memory footprints are also going to be important for people like me without more than a gigabyte of RAM. I’ll get on a side-by-side soon.

Keeping my promise from before, I have decided to give Opera another chance to prove itself to me. I had ventured once into these strange waters but did not have anything to show for it except for a lasting impression of “This just doesn’t feel like my Fox.” I decided then that I would, given the right amount of time, try it out in earnest at a later date. Since I’ve upgraded from Blogger to WordPress, I also figured it’d be fitting to try out Opera at the same time. So what did I find out?

info @ the P.Pole 07.23.07

Here I am blogging happily on WordPress. Surprisingly enough, the decision to swap over didn’t take me too long and I’m (so far) glad that I have made the switch.

5 things I like about WordPress:

PSP 3.40 OEA

Aside: This is my first post on WordPress. It’s fitting that it’s got to do with looks, because I think this new page is looking pretty hot with the Blix theme (and my own header image). I can’t edit my CSS on the standard, free web version but with themes as clean and functional as these, it’s not a big deal.

I’ve been killing it on my custom firmware for the past month or so and honestly, I don’t understand how people can get by without it. I mean, yeah, the standard come-with Sony firmwares are fine and all (not to mention pretty) but there’s just so much you can do (i.e. not very much at all) in terms of customization. I mean, you can change the hue of the icons/ shadows/ text and the image used as a background but that’s about as far as it goes when it comes to the basic Sony-brand firmware. I’ve yet to install my own theme yet but I intend to once my PSP is done charging (I have a tendency to be a complete battery whore). So, did I brick up?

P.Pole’s [Custom] Template

I’m quite proud of my template for this blog that I’ve slowly created and altered over the years. It started out as a generic, one-size-fits-all kind of template that most blogs run on but I didn’t want my page to look exactly like all the others. Okay, to say that it’s completely groundbreaking in its layout is a huge exaggeration, but for someone without any actual knowledge of how to code (apart from some very primordial HTML), I think I’ve done quite nicely for myself. I mean, I had to pretty much move, shape, shift, and shapeshift by trial and error. Here’s how I “coded” the stuff on this page (which, by the way, looks proper only on Firefox so far, by my testing, because of my “coding”):

1. I imagine something cool I want to achieve and catalog it away for a rainy day.
2. I take note when I see something I cataloged on another site I happen upon.
3. I press Ctrl + U (read: “View source”).
4. I sift through to the good part and see if it’s something done without javascript (which I don’t know how to use).
5. If it’s javascript, I sigh and move on. Otherwise, I move on to step six.
6. I go to Google.ca and look up something along the lines of “HTML (or CSS) [tag] tutorial” where [tag] is whatever the hell tag or function or whatchamacallit I saw the other page using.
7. I then read through and try to understand how the tag and its parameters work.
8. This is the fun step: I spend hours and hours typing in stuff mostly haphazardly, clicking “Preview”, and then going back to make the appropriate (i.e. guess and check) corrections.
9. When this is all done I marvel at what I’ve created for a few moments before I check its rendering in Internet Explorer (explosion) and then in Opera (assplosion).

If I had any idea whatsoever how to code this all properly without relying so much on guess and check, I’d be able to make changes so that my page would render decently across all forms of web browsers. Sadly, I do not have the patience to sit down and really learn this stuff as it bores me. And anyway, I think I sort of enjoy my current way of doing things too much to give it up. Firefox tricked me into thinking it kept web standards before, but now I know that the developers took a few liberties with it (or so I’ve heard from watching videos of conferences with web standard discussions). Apparently they decided that some rules were better kept and others bent/broken. I don’t know what that means in detail but hey, I don’t think I’ll need to know all that to be able to enjoy my Webernets.
Nevertheless, I thought maybe since my current template is running a bit cluttered I would consider upgrading my template to Blogger’s new way of handling templates that much resembles Xanga’s styling pages. This would mean pretty much wiping my entire template settings (even though I simply love my fly-out/mouse-over menu things). And so, I decided to check out Blogger’s version of the template designer on my other “blog” (which is just there to reserve the domain and for testing such as this). I wanted to see if I could make it work towards my needs, whether it was worth the switch, and whether there might be a chance of my reworking my menus (again, my favourite part of this template) to work there. So far, no luck. I mean, it’s convenient to have them do kind of what I’ve done with the hierarchy look that now comes default but it’s not a mouse-over fly-out.
It’s got auto-adding and -sorting of new stuff (like links, archive links, etc…) whereas I update my template every month with the new links myself (every month I add a new list item linking to the new month’s posts). Still, I’m not convinced. It looks as if the new template designer thing is great for adding page elements and quickly editing them but it doesn’t do much in terms of allowing me to really tweak stuff with the HTML/CSS editor and that’s what I need to be able to do above all else. It’s either that or I just don’t know enough to be good at manipulating (the right bits of) code. Sigh.
Anyway, I’m going to stick with my current state of affairs until I really find a reason to switch over and get rid of/recreate my mouse-over menus. I love that thing. Mouse… over! Mouse… over! Wee!

Vista Fraggers

Remember a couple months ago when I went on and on about my mail-order gaming mouse? Well, when I got my Logitech MX310 I had to tweak my driver files (read: overclock my mouse) before I could take full advantage of the mouse’s abilities. Ever since I migrated to Vista, I’ve never gotten too much into the FPS games since my mouse ran at the average polling rate of ~125 Hz which just doesn’t cut it when I’m trying to blow a baddy’s head off with a 50 caliber sniper rifle.
Up until today, my searches for a way to overclock my USB ports on Vista turned up nothing. I don’t know whether it was my searching or people not having invented some way of doing it yet. Anyway, long story short, for all those fragging on Vista, check out this thread (you need to register on Overclock3d.net to download the zip file) to overclock your own ports for better and smoother fragging all around. I am now happily chugging along at ~450 Hz.
In related news, Battlefield 2142 is fun. It was fun even when I could hardly aim but now that I’ve got almost 4x the sniping power, well, it’s great fun and I’d suggest it to anyone with even a half-decent machine to give it a go. I just can’t wait until Gears of War comes out for PC. Curbstomping and chainsawing can never be a bad combination.

My Latest Look

I got tired of my Samurize dock and decided to tweak a little. I ended up making a whole other one from pseudo-scratch. That’s what you’ll see in the bottom left corner. As usual, there is the Winamp track progress bar (the larger blue stripe) and my CPU Idle percentage (I made two smaller semi-circular stripes that meet together at 9 o’ clock for this one). The overall effect is pretty sweet I think. There’s also the album art, current track number, and artist + title scroller. As you can see, my “dock” is mostly just a Winamp stats displayer replacement with an idle bar.
For the rest of my functionality requirements I’ve still got my tabbed Objectdock at the bottom of the screen and my invisible’d Vista start menu. A random thing I discovered about Vista (not sure if this works in XP) was that pressing Ctrl + Esc also brings up the start menu just as if I pressed the Windows key. Neato.

God’s Jackpot

I don’t mean to associate God with gambling or anything but today’s date is exactly all made up of sevens — 07.07.07 — and I think it’s also strangely fitting to have my 490th post on such a day (490 = 7 x 70 of course). Seeing as how seven is supposedly God’s number, I figured today would be a holy jackpot of sorts… I don’t really have anything specific I want to talk about so I suppose I’ll write about my comings and goings of late.
As mentioned before, I decided to write about one Clive Staples Lewis for a pretty big paper. To date, I’ve read all of “The Magician’s Nephew” and approximately thirty-four pages of “The Pilgrim’s Regress” which is a bit of strange book to say the least. It’s not a novel or narrative per se. It is sort of like an allegorical story but on crack where everything is very obviously representative of something else, and dabbling heavily in Christian and Biblical themes. It’s a slower read than “The Magician’s Nephew” — the likes of which I thoroughly enjoyed, mind you.
After reading just the first book of “The Chronicles of Narnia” series, I’ve grown quite fond of Lewis’ writing style and quirky humour. I’m beginning to understand why he’s so admired by so many people. It has something to do, I think, with his almost childlike demeanor in viewing, constructing, and describing his ideas.
Anyway, this coming week is looking packed with LoaH and Summer Retreat practices and I’m quite looking forward to them. IMO the best part about serving in a musical capacity is the practice and fellowship time I get to have with my peers/teammates. I mean, playing and actually leading is exhilarating too, but I don’t really take more joy in that part than one should (since it’s leading and not soaking that I’m supposed to be doing). LoaH songs are sounding pretty good for the most part after our intense practice the other day — Eric (vocals and guitar), Stephen (drums), Adwin (electric guitar), and I (bass) practiced without Melissa Kwan (second vocals) this Thursday morning for three hours. Retreat worship is also looking pretty good so far, but that is to be expected with the competent leadership of mainly Katherine and Gabriel. I think playing my bass in these kinds of settings is pretty much the best part of my summers nowadays. With no job (part-time or otherwise) in sight, I’m going to make playing my summer (pre)occupation for this year pretty much.
My aunt and uncle (Monique and Jock respectively) are over from the states with their young son, Philip. Before you go “Haha, sucker!” because of the addition of an extra young’un (my sister + Philip = 2 little and potentially annoying kids) in my vicinity, I want to sneer at you because with Philip here, my sister is officially sleeping over for the duration of their trip. And with them (my aunt, uncle, and cousin) staying with my grandparents, I am virtually un-childbearing. This means I can do all the things I couldn’t do at home (with my sister around) before, like leave my stuff out without fear of annihilation and play with my more dangerous toys (like my totally hot Zippo and… I don’t have any other violent toys actually). Of course, this liberation comes at the price of having my aunt and uncle randomly coming over to borrow my wireless Internets… That leads to me thinking “GTFO my Internets before I telegib you.” but saying “Hi, welcome! Feel free to use it as you please.”

FWD: You’re going to die a lonely, painful death if you don’t foward this to everyone and eat dirt and…

I don’t know why but I got the sudden urge to hate on forwarded messages during the car ride home tonight. I’m not going to rant (I promise I’ll keep it short this time). I’m just going to ask you (all of you, there are now no exceptions or special favourites to be excused) to never ever pass along one of those “Read this or you will have 70 years of bad luck” type emails to me (as if I expect to live to be +80 anyway). I hate them. I never pass them along and I never read them. If you send one to me, you’re basically condemning me to whatever the hell is promised inside that email as a warning against ignoring it because I intend on and will succeed in ignoring the damnable thing. With the number of “Read this only if you have time for God” emails I’ve passed up, I probably need to convert to Roman Catholicism and buy an eternity load of indulgences to get my condemned self out of purgatory. It seems I might have offended some people with that last remark so my work here is done for tonight.

PS: Really, don’t send me them, unless you want to be goatse‘d. Trust me, you don’t want to get goatse‘d. I never was but that doesn’t mean I’ve never thought of passing it along.