Juan J. Martínez used to talk here about Open Source and Other Things.
This is a blog in archive mode, you can read new posts at en_GB@blog
January 26, 2011
"Home Dash is the newest Prospector experiment to improve search and content discovery in Firefox. It removes all the standard web browser interface like the location bar, search bar and tabs; and leaves behind just a Firefox logo that is used to bring up a dashboard. […] While still far from it’s end goal, this was the original idea of making a browse-based browser (as opposed to a search-based one)."
This kind of interface is starting to make a lot of sense. I remember that back in the late 90s, Internet was something exceptional, and you were not connected most of the time, so the location bar, and later searching, was a very important aspect of the experience.
But today things are different. I think I’m using 8 or may be 10 sites every day (plus lots of feeds, but that’s outside the browser), and searching it’s not the center of my experience.
If searching is the exception, why I’m using a search based browser?
I must confess I’m not in the video/audio business, and I don’t know 100% about the differences between Theora and H.264 and its licensing model.
But I do know about GIF and MP3, so it’s easy to choose a side in this topic: go for open source supported and royalty-free technology for the win!
There’s another point. My three years old laptop can hardly play a video in some of the flash players out there, and certainly it’s not able to play most of the HD videos. Flash on Fedora (eh, Linux) sucks and melts my CPU even with small ads.
With HTML5 and in-browser Theora support it’s different. The video in this post plays smooth and using about 30% of my CPU. Yes, it’s the way to go (or you can donate some bucks so I can buy a new laptop, dammit!).
I don’t get the point to buy a Quad Core laptop just to watch some videos on the Internet, do you?
Free Software Alternatives to Browsing the Web from Linux
Seems that the world doesn’t end with Firefox and Gecko (its rendering engine). There are other options, and two that I didn’t know and look promising are:
Arora: QtWebKit based, with the WebKit rendering engine. It’s stable and supports, among others, the Flash plugin (that is as clumsy as running with Firefox). It uses the Qt toolkit.
Midori: WebKit rendering engine again, but this time using GTK+ toolkit. Maybe it’s not as mature as Arora, but looks pretty good and definitely it’s worth keeping an eye on it.
I’m using Firefox 3.5, and since the memory consumption it’s not an issue for me, I’m fine with it. Arora looks and feels great, but I’m staying with Firefox by now.
At the moment my only issue with Firefox 3.x is that Zimbra 4.x doesn’t work with it, and I need to have a backup installation of Firefox 2.x. Neither Arora nor Midori works fine with Zimbra 4.x (both use WebKit, remember).
Because that’s the problem with randomness, and this can be a problem too. I’ve not noticed the problem with FF 3.5 and Fedora 11 (and I can’t discard it’s plain FUD), but it reminded me this comic strip.
"Maybe someday the Linux version of Firefox won’t be treated as a second class citizen, especially considering it’s by far the most popular browser on the platform."
"A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser."
As the Washington Post article says, this may introduce vulnerabilities into Firefox. Great for a security update that installs unwanted software without user permission, isn’t it?
I wonder why people keeps on relying on closed source, but with those update policies, I believe it’s a total nonsense.
