Fitting the battle of life

Or, how I learned that the newest isn’t always the best.

Firefox got an upgrade last night, to beta 5 (the final beta before release later this month) – and my two favourite extensions – in fact, the only two I ever really use – are incompatible. Yes, AdBlock and Twitterfox are no longer my friends. This is bad for a few reasons:

• ads are evil, obtrusive and just plain annoying
• the web looks so nice without them (oh, I remember the singing ads on facebook…)
• I am getting addicted to twitter.

I look forward to seeing these fixed sharpish!

Following up from my first impressions, I’m now on beta 3 (which comes as default in the Hardy beta), and noticing a few more features I’m really impressed with.

First up is better download management. It was good to begin with, but there’s now a quick-look indicator in the status bar so you can keep track of how everything’s going without bringing up the download window:

The new download window itself has been revamped, but I don’t like having to right-click to clear the list – having a separate button was much more intuitive. I suppose that with the ’search’ box as well, the developers were aiming for a google-esque archiving everything you’ve ever downloaded feature, but it doesn’t really float my boat.

It may just be the slightly tweaked Hardy icon set, but I’ve noticed some tiny icon changes, specifically dealing with rss feed icons, which look slicker if a little bigger to my eye (can’t compare as I’m on a clean install of Hardy). Shots of both the address bar and live bookmark icons:

Finally, the new Add-ons dialogue is a great idea, letting you search for extensions without opening up another tab, but in my first test didn’t perform that well. Still, it’s a neat feature to have:

That’s about it for now, will do another update when it moves out of beta.

Interesting to wonder what the difference might be between two dictionaries – en_GB and English / United Kingdom…

Perhaps one is the built-in Firefox dictionary and the other belongs to Ubuntu? [As an aside, the 'misspelled' word is Ubuntu - which isn't being shown as misspelled as I write this post...how odd! Of course, switching to South Africa/ZA certainly did recognise the word. sabdfl's bias showing through?]

There are a couple of things I’m really liking in F3b3 (if I may use that as shorthand in this entry):

• Proper gnome integration, so it doesn’t stand out ridiculously any more. IIRC, Gutsy introduced the Human icons into  the Ubuntu build of the browser, but now there’s fuller integration so it fits better with some themes. Woo!
• Drag and drop drags a preview of what you’re dragging…that probably makes no sense whatsoever until you highlight something and try and drag it. Just looks quite good. I have noticed it doesn’t look as slick on Linux as it did on Windows the other day, which is annoying. Perhaps it’s just my ATI card. Everything can be blamed on an ATI card.
• The ‘Smart Bookmarks’ folder is a nice idea, but takes up a bit of space on the bookmarks toolbar. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it there. As it is, I’ve removed the names for all my bookmarks to conserve space (and I manage to remember what all the icons mean – not hard when they say things like ‘bbc’!).
• I can’t remember what they’re calling it (they being all the cool kids) but the new drop-down menu from the address bar is cool. Takes a little getting used to, I suppose – but then all things do.

So far few (if any) crashes/problems. NatWest won’t let me bank using it, so I fire up old version 2, and it feels a bit dated. Oh, how times change. I remember Firefox 2 launching, all those moons ago. Anyway, first impressions are good. But having enabled backports, I now have 32 updates sitting there in the status bar of my desktop being ignored, and I’d like to get rid of the icon…