RasterWeb!
Remember when I said Chrome was annoying (and probably hinted they were evil) because they hid the ‘view source’ command?
Welcome to evil Firefox!
And yeah, Firefox also hides the protocol in the latest versions. Luckily it’s fairly easy to unhide it.
Still, I’m not a fan of the layer of chrome being applied to Firefox.
One more than one occasion, people have asked why I don’t use Google Chrome, or Apple’s Safari, or even Opera or Microsoft Internet Explorer… I think this sums it up pretty well:
Mozilla’s mission is to build user sovereignty into the fabric of the Internet. We work to ensure that the the Internet remains open, interoperable and accessible to all. To do this we build products, we build decentralized participation worldwide, and we build the ability for people to create their own experiences in addition to consuming commercial offerings.
As the “web” changes, I think it’s probably necessary for Mozilla to change as well.
Read the whole thing: Mozilla in the New Internet Era – More Than the Browser.
I happened to visit the Chrome Web Store using Firefox, and I was greeted with the following message:
Sorry, we don’t support your browser just yet. You’ll need Google Chrome to install apps, extensions and themes.
Wait… I was using Mozilla Firefox to visit the Chrome Web Store, so why am I posting this?
Because Google has given me hope. See, they said “we don’t support your browser just yet” and with that “just yet” part, I’m going to assume that they will support my browser at some point in the future.
I plan to revisit this post every few months to see if the status has changed.
I know all the hep cats out there have the latest Intel MacBooks to write their Ruby code on, but you would do well to remember that there are still a lot of useful PowerPC-based PowerMacs out there, being used daily for general purpose computing. These machines were the powerhouses of yesteryear at many a creative agency, and a lot of them have big drives, plenty of RAM, and are still running. They get passed down to folks who aren’t running any heavy apps like Photoshop, InDesign, or Final Cut Pro.
And dammit, I want those people to be able to browse the web in a reasonably modern fashion.
TenFourFox may be the best option now that Firefox 4 is out and has abandoned the PowerPC architecture.
Here’s some words worth reading:
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years of using Macs, it’s that they outlast anything else out there. Why shouldn’t an iBook be able to look at embarrassing pictures on Facebook, or Twitter about our lunch break? These are our computers, dang it. We paid good money for them. They still work. There’s no technical reason they can’t do everything that a MacBook can. So if you want something done, you do it yourself, and we did. The result is TenFourFox.
You’ve still got do deal with things like older versions of Flash (yuck) and QuickTime. I mean, everyone is abandoning PowerPC-based Macs, and it’s only a matter of time, but TenFourFox buys you some time, just like WaMCom bought us some time back in the old days… I’ve always thankful for the people behind these projects. They take on work that the so-called “official” software developers won’t, or can’t. I know there’s only so many hours in the day, and developer time has to be focused, but still… it’s always a shame to see working technology abandoned.
Anyway, TenFourFox is now on two machines, and I’ll put it on more if I need to, and let you know how it goes…
For some reason (probably the whole “end of one year, beginning of another” thing, I felt like grabbing the visitor stats for this site.
I hadn’t realized that it was only about 6 months since the last time I did this. Even better, now we can compare! See the July 2010 stats if you want to review.
Compared to last time, Firefox is down, while Chrome is up. I guess that’s not surprising. Chrome is gaining in popularity. As for this site, I write about Firefox and Mozilla a lot more than I write about Chrome, so I’d still expect some good Firefox numbers.
Internet Explorer is down (thank goodness!) but so is Safari. I’d almost expect Safari to go up a bit due to the iOS… but I guess not.
Windows went up slightly, while the Mac stayed about the same. iPad went from less than 2% to over 11%. I really didn’t write much about the iPad until the end of December, of course, a lot more iPads are out there now.
The interesting number here is the second one, 768×1024, which I believe correlates to iPad in portrait mode. Very interesting! The other numbers are all pretty close. Do I really have that many visitors to this site using iPads?
I’ll have to remind myself to check the numbers again in 6 months…