pseudopost.org

This is just a random rant. Feel free to ignore, rant back or help.

Flash sucks

First there were the problems with (the rather new) pulseaudio. You could not play flash sound and have a media player running at the same time. I installed flashplugin-nonfreebeta to get Flash 10 Beta, which seemed slightly better and works in Firefox (ok, last.fm eating 100% CPU), Epiphany and Opera, so I stick to it. Then, yesterday, after an update to this package, Flash stopped working in all browsers. Found no solution, switched back to Flash 9. Works in Firefox and Epiphany but NOT Opera. Argh. Haven’t tested audio stuff yet. All this switching and testing versions involves many browser restarts, X restarts, media player restarts and, in the worst case, media player library re-imports. Sucks.

Random Window Sizes for Firefox and Eye Of Gnome

Sometimes Firefox opens maximized (that’s good), sometimes “almost maximized” (that’s ok) and sometimes “almost maximzed but stretched to a different virtual desktop than it appears to be on” with the effect that Alt-Tab’ing to it doesn’t work properly (that’s unbearable!). Even worse with EOG (Gnome’s default image viewer): while Firefox only extends by some pixels into another desktop, EOG’s upper 20% of the window including the title bar are on the other desktop, which means no quick drag’n'drop or click to maximize to fix this annoyance, instead I have to maximize its window by the context menu in the taskbar. Sucks.

As I noticed in the current trunk build of Firefox 3.0 beta3 the developers decided to change the behavior of the “go to”-button, the green one in the location bar. While it was always there and clickable in Firefox 2, it’s now only visible when you’re editing the URL. When you’re just viewing a page it’s gone.

Why is this a problem? What’s the use of it anyway?

Well, considering myself a semi-poweruser, I, of course, do not click the goto-button for visiting pages after entering the URL — at least not since the late nineties.

I use (or used) the goto-button to refresh a page I’m currently on. But there’s the reload-button for that! I hear you screaming. Right, BUT: Reload and goto make a difference in how Firefox handles its cache. I don’t know exactly how, as the page’s content is updated in both cases, but it seems Firefox ignores linked content like images, CSS files etc. when the goto is used.

To compare and validate the felt difference I installed YSlow (for Firefox 2.0.0.11 — it’s not available for Firefox 3, yet). Here are the loading times of the German tech-news site heise online, first using the goto-button then the proper reload:

My plea to the Firefox devs: Either…

• give us the old behavoir back and show the goto-button permanently.
• or offer an option in about:config to choose.
• or fix the reload-button to offer “fast-reloading”, too. Maybe F5 = fast reload, Ctrl-F5 = full reload as it’s in IE IIRC.

Thank you.

PS: Other than that Firefox 3 really rocks. Even in beta and with unauthorized addons it’s more stable than 2.0.0.x :)

Ich habe mich eben fast zwei Stunden am Apache totkonfiguriert, bis ich gemerkt habe, dass der Firefox einen einmal fehlgeleiteten Redirect (es sollte von fuubar.de nach www.foobar.com weitergeleitet werden) auf ewig gespeichert hat.

Mit network.http.use-cache auf true, was die Default-Einstellung ist, macht sich Firefox nicht einmal die Mühe, zu gucken, ob sich an dem gewünschten Dokument etwas geändert hat. Dann hätte er nämlich mitbekommen, dass der Apache inzwischen ganz woanders hin verweist.

In Zukunft werde ich diese Option nicht erst nach zwei Stunden in Betracht ziehen. Dafür habe ich wieder einiges vom Apache gelernt, was mir bei schneller Ursachenfindung natürlich verwehrt geblieben wäre *hust*.