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Firefox 3: Lost a Few Extensions, Found Others… No Smooth Sailing Though

Several of my favorite Firefox extensions did not make it to 3.0 for compatibility reasons, but I found functional equivalents for almost all.  Amongst the (temporary)  losses is  Zoho QuickRead, being replaced by OpenITOnline (The Zoho Team tells me QuickRead will be FF3 compatible in a few days The FF3 compatible Zoho QuickRead update is now available).

OpenITOnline is a handy extension that allows you to read documents online without the need to first download, then open them in the relevant Office applications.  The file formats currently handled are:

  • Documents (*.doc, *.rtf, *.odt, *.sxw)
  • Spreadsheets (*.xls, *.csv, *.ods, *.sxc)
  • Presentations (*.ppt, *.pps, *.odp, *.sxi)
  • Images (*.jpg, *.gif,*.png)

There’s an easy guided setup, where I changed the default Zoho Viewer to the relevant “active” services, i.e. Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show.  OpenITOnline also supports Google Docs and ThinkFree.

My old-style del.icio.us extension was replaced by the functionally richer new one.  The PayPal Plugin became a casualty, just days after I had discovered it.

The upgrade itself was anything but smooth sailing, and I’m not referring to the initial download fiasco.  The new Firefox appeared to work fine on the Vista PC, but exhibited strange behavior on two XP machines.

It simply did not “remember” the settings for two key extensions: every single time I started Firefox I got flooded by pop-up windows to configure Gmail Manager (one window for each account) and had to go through the hoops of setting up Foxmarks. For a while I thought the extensions were to blame, or perhaps a strange interaction with some of the new extensions – once you’re on the wrong track, you can spend hours uninstalling/ reinstalling them in various sequences.  But then I noticed some of my default settings were gone, homepage reset, cookie handling and history tracking all changed.  Weirdest of all was the fact that the “OK” button did not work on any configuration/setup screen.

So now I knew something was wrong with Firefox itself – to cut a long story short, I could fix one of the laptops by some magic sequence of uninstalling/reinstalling everything a few times, but the other one was hopeless.  I had to resort to brute force: uninstall Firefox, wipe out all related directories (those ugly documents etc.. \user\ local data\whatever paths), then System Restore to the day before the Firefox upgrade, then install everything again, followed buy repeated Windows and McAfee updates that the system forgot due to the Restore.  It was ugly.

Now Firefox 3 (almost) works, except that the “Use my choice for all cookies from this site” button does not seem to do anything. (Update: It’s damn frustrating having to hit the same button a zillion times!)

I lost about half a day, and more importantly at a time I really couldn’t afford it, had more urgent things to do.  Not the first time, and I’m afraid not the last one either.  But this time I’ve decided to do something about it: I’m presenting a virtual invoice to Mozilla, for the productive time lost.

Of course this invoice won’t ever be paid.. but I already feel better. Every time a software company hijacks my productive time, I will create a Virtual Invoice.  (I already have another one in the queue, for Microsoftcoming soon).

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Gmail Faster? Are You Sure?

Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it’s something that we think about and work on everyday. We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster

– says the Official Gmail Blog. They go on:

One of the areas we worked on was the initial loading sequence: everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the “Sign in” button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. While the improvements we made won’t resolve every “This is taking longer than usual…” message you might see when loading Gmail over a slow connection, we’ve seen a real reduction (up to 20%) in overall load time compared to when we started.

Hm…so the initial loading sequence got faster. Great news – I have only one question: Why do I now always see this previously unknown progress bar every time I sign in to Gmail?

Btw, I created the account specifically for this test, so it has absolutely no email to be pre-processed. Truth be told the progress bar flashes up and disappears quite fast in the empty account, but it stays there long enough in my real accounts with a lot of data. Not exactly a sign of progress, if you ask me (pun intended).

Update: A sure sign that Gmail must have gone through some changes is that the very popular Gmail Manager Firefox add-on is now knocked out: it is unable to login to any Google Apps email accounts. Regular Gmail accounts appear to be unaffected.

Update#2: I guess I should point out the positive side of the story: this approach is a lot better (transparent) then the Microsoft approach to their slow copy problem, where Vista SP1 improved (perceived) performance partly by rethinking the progress-bar. smile_omg