From the Orient

I think you have to try Magicline to see how good it is. [via "Phil":http://philringnalda.com/blog/2005/08/the_monkeys_back.php]

I’m rather impressed by the “latest version of Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. I’ve always been impressed by Firefox, but the Preview Release has a real polished, this is ready for the big time, feel about it.

Apart from fixing “my little bloglines/tabbrowser issue”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2004/09/08/extensions the latest release has small but important enhancements such as a better default theme; the same theme as before but just better. I’m no UI expert but there are small changes on the spacing and icons that improve it.

The Improved Find is excellent, and Live Bookmarks would be very useful if I still used bookmarks. Someone not using a feed reader, and used to favourites and bookmarks would find this very useful indeed. Simon Willison points out that “a killer app for Live bookmarks”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/09/14/liveBookmarks would be where your “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us feed as a live bookmark “will give you access to your most recently added items within the browser UI”

What I think would be the killer-app would be when you can drag a link into that bookmark folder (as you can with normal bookmarks) and that is automatically added to you linklog. Automatic, synchronized, live linklogging from your browser.

“Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com and the “Tabbrowser Extension for Firefox”:http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions.html.en don’t like each other very much. You can click on folders in Bloglines and get the posts, but not on individual feeds. Whilst annoying, this hasn’t been too much of an issue until after I’d been on holiday. My link lists folder had nearly 2000 unread posts and I couldn’t read them all in one sitting.

“IE view”:http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=35&vid=156 and “the great”:http://philringnalda.com/blog/2004/08/getting_back_out_of_ie.php “Firefox View”:http://www.iosart.com/firefox/firefoxview/ to the rescue. From bloglines, I enter Internet Explorer. I can click on individual feeds and pick them off one by one. If a page interests me, I can click Firefox View and it opens as a new tab in the background in Firefox. Kludgey but magic. And isn’t IE annoying to use after being with Firefox?

You are in a maze of tabbed browser windows all alike. There are exits left, right, up and down.

Requires “Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/, “Tabbrowser Extension”:http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions.html.en and a lost sense of proportion.

A new version of Firefox is “now out (Mozillazine announcement and discussion with some interesting comments about configuration and some less interesting comments about themes)”:http://mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4843.

On my system it is a lot quicker at loading pages. Maybe it was just cruft build up on my system, but the new import tool made this the first upgrade that was painless and almost effortless. The new Extension Manager means I’ve still got to add in all my extensions again but hopefully this will be the last time I have to do that.

To be clear on this, the import tool is brilliant. My profile, my cookies, my configuration and my setup were all imported without fuss into the new browser. This is an important step towards a mainstream browser.

I’m not sure I care for the new default theme, but I’m not going to comment futher as “the argument about that (This is the sanest link I could find that described the reason for the new theme in a calm and informative way)”:http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2004/june/newdefaulttheme is almost as pointless and divisive as the “Mass Syndication Debate (Sam Ruby called for detente and started off another round)”:http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2004/05/28/detente.

Further reading

* “A big list of weblogs talking about 0.9″:http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/005714.html
* “Burning Edge”:http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/archives/000466.html

The Bloglines Toolkit for Mozilla written by Chad Everett is something I meant to blog about last week before the “MovableType”:http://www.movabletype.com situation occurred. It puts the bloglines notifier into your Mozilla-based browser. I installed it straightaway, and have just “upgraded to the latest version (version 0.9)”:http://www.cxliv.org/jayseae/2004/05/13/bloglines_toolkit_v0r9.html.

Allowing me to subscribe to feeds, search for references or even search for highlighted text it is a very useful addition to my set of extensions.