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Looking Forward To Firefox 3

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 4, 2008

Firefox is my favorite browser, as I mentioned in my post about Error Doctor. Now it’s in testing for the next release, Firefox 3, and I can hardly wait.

The main improvement that I’m looking for is how it handles memory. For all its good qualities, it uses a lot of RAM, which, when you’re doing as many things as I tend to do at once, really starts slowing down other things. I’ll admit that I’m not quite sure how virtual memory works, but Firefox can eat it up the longer you have the browser running. It got so bad for me that I had to turn off pre-caching of sites just to free up some of that memory.

So, just that one feature would be enough for me. But there are a few more things coming that I like. There will be more security against bad sites, those sites that will drop malware and other nasty things on a flyby. You’ll also be able to close your browser and have open right back up to everything you just closed out if you wish; I love that idea, because I’ve often had to shut it down for some reason or another, and forgot to bookmark some pages I’d wanted to read. Something else it will do that I don’t have an issue with but others do is that if you have to close the browser in the middle of a download, it will pick that download back up when it’s opened again; that’s actually pretty great.

Of course, I won’t be happy if all the extensions I presently use won’t work with it, but I hear most of the developers are scrambling to get them all working, and that would be a good thing. Oh yeah, it’s supposed to be faster than Firefox 2, and no one ever complains about more speed, do they?

So yeah, I’m ready for Firefox 3. I will not be a tester, though, so anyone else who’d like to do it can, as the beta is available already. I hope you have a good experience with it; I’ll wait until the real thing is ready.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell

Error Doctor To The Rescue

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 31, 2008

First, if you notice to the right, there are now a few sponsored links to products. I’ve added those there because, well, this is a marketing blog that’s trying to earn some money, but also because I’m familiar with most of them, including the one I’m about to write on now.

I use Firefox for my browser, and I love it. What I especially love are all the customized things you can do with it. For instance, instead of having the boring background and frame that most other people do, on the browser here on my main computer I actually have a theme that highlights the Kansas City Chiefs, because I love the colors, and because I like the team, though I’m mainly a Dallas Cowboys fan. On the Firefox browser on my laptop, I’m using the theme from the show Futurama, which has all these icons of characters from the show instead of the regular buttons.

Something else it can do is allow you to change the look of some of the pages that one visits from time to time. For instance, this is what my Google looks like:

And this is what the images page looks like:

And this is what my Wikipedia looks like:

You can download the stuff you need to do things like this by going to a page called Userstyles.org; lots of great stuff there. Anyway, once I got a taste of that sort of thing, I learned that there’s another page called Userscripts.org, which is special scripting that people have created so that you can do things on pages that you probably really shouldn’t be able to do. For instance, one script allows you to download any video you see on YouTube in a MP4 format, though there are plenty others in other formats. One that I use a lot is one that increases the size of pictures on Facebook to the size they actually are, so I don’t have to keep trying to figure out what people look like from all those small profile pictures.

On the Userscripts page, they warn you that some of the scripts might cause problems with your computer from time to time. Though I’m usually a pretty cautious guy, I figured that everything was going to work just fine, because, after all, it did with the Styles site. I loaded five or six scripts that did different things, and everything seemed to work for maybe 30 minutes. From that point on, my computer basically locked up. I rebooted multiple times, and that did nothing. I unloaded all the programs from the Userscripts program, which is called Greasemonkey, and that did nothing. I ran Regcleaner and that did nothing either, because it didn’t know what to do. I tried running my antivirus, spyware and spam programs, but they wouldn’t work either. I was stuck.

Then I remembered that I had Error Doctor on my computer, and I decided to give that a try. When one’s system is running reasonably well, it usually completes its job in about 2 minutes. In this case, it took the program 15 minutes to do its job, but at the end of it, when I told it to fix everything, it did its job perfectly. I then ran it a second time, just to make sure, and in two minutes it was done, with nothing except some minor registry clean ups. I rebooted the computer, and everything came back just as it had been beforehand. I did load two of the scripts back, which were really the only two I’d wanted in the first place, and I’ve had no problems since.

Now, if that’s not a ringing endorsement for Error Doctor, I don’t know what could be. It’s not all that expensive, and it works wonders. So, if you’re ever in need, make sure to grab a copy. It could save you a lot of money on the back end.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Framed Autographed Cast Photograph with 7 Signatures and Descriptive Plate – L.E. of 250

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell