Snow Blind

A few friends have been talking about moving to the google chrome web browser. For a long time, I’ve been a big proponent of Firefox. And truth be told, haven’t had much of a reason to even look for an alternative. The game changed with Firefox 3. While Firefox still remains the browser of choice for many in the tech savy community, I know others as well as I have suffered through increasing instability and what feels like a bloated application. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an awesome browser and I still whole heartedly recommend it to any poor user I come across still using IE without knowing that there are better alternatives out there.

Good thing technology is always sprouting new seeds, though. I decided to try and feed my new gadget need and trying out a some of the alternatives. I’ll give Google credit. It definitely is a nice browser and I ,surprisingly, haven’t come across many gotchas while perusing the interwebs in my new chromed out set of wheels (pun intended). But it is not without flaws.

2 jump out to me right away. First is it’s handling of xml formed documents is terrible. It seems to try and view them as if they were html documents. Also it needs to have some way to handle rss files as live bookmarks. I personally find live bookmarks as more of an annoyance, but it’s still a standard feature in todays browser and I see no reason effort shouldn’t be made to make it contain the features that have become standards. All in all, this is a pretty trivial feature missing. After all, a browser is for, well, browsing html pages. Can I seriously knock it for having non essential features? Of course I can! But it’s still not going to keep me from using a good product.

The second missing feature isn’t really something that is standard, but it is something that has become so ingrained in my web browsing usage, that I dare say I couldn’t be without it. Yes, it’s my delicious bookmarks. I’ve tried various solutions that have failed for one way or another. I have recently read that the ability to incorporate plugins is on the horizon, so I have faith that a solution will be in the works form some one, but if I’m going to use it now, I will need a solution now.

Ok, so </rant>.

Start howto:

I did, however, come up with a quasi-solution. This makes it serviceable until a more elegant solution comes along. There are tons of posts out there talking about how to get a bookmarklet to tag sites to delicious. That wasn’t really my dilemma. What I wanted was to be able to easily find any of my 1000 or so bookmarks that I have already tagged. Isn’t that the point of bookmarks? To be able to easily retrieve what you have already found?

Well, since I normally end up searching through them any ways, I figured perhaps I could harness the keyword search capability of chrome. To create a new one, follow the instructions:

1. Right click the address bar and choose “Edit search engines”
2. Click “add”
3. Give it a name, something like… oh, I don’t know… “Delicious.com”
4. Then give it a keyword like say “delicious.com”. I tried to create one without the .com, but it didn’t seem to like that.
5. Enter the search URL. If you want to search just your own bookmarks (what I was looking for) enter this in: http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts&p=%s&lc=1&u=<your_delicious_username>

Now, when you type delicious.com <some search term> it will search through your bookmarks. Again, not nearly as elegant as the delicious plugin for firefox, but as I said, hopefully some gracious member of the community is feverishly working to right this injustice in the chrome world, but until then, I think this will get me by. Hopefully you too.

I posted once before about social bookmarking and now is just as good a time as any to revisit it. The site I use, del.icio.us, has recently just jumped their user interface ahead about a dozen years with a new design. Along with that, they implemented a bunch of other updates that aren’t as obvious as their visual updates which they outline in their blog post.

Seriously, if you don’t use social bookmarking, you should really consider it and no better time than now. I like a lot of the changes they have made and other than the easier to navigate interface, the overall speed of the site is really noticeable. You used to really be able to tell when the servers were being taxed before, but it feels quick and smooth now. It’s good that they finally fixed the site to be up to par with their functionality. Kudos to yahoo for fixing an already great service.

If you want to know what I’m tagging, you can find me here.

Last Saturday I decided to upgrade to the latest Kubuntu version that had just been released, Hardy Heron. Like 3 hours later (mostly from package downloads), I had an almost working system. Most of it seemed pretty good, except I had no internet and it wasn’t recognizing my wireless card.

I spent 45 minutes tethered to my wired connection trying to get it to work. Eventually I got it by removing the driver package for my card and installing a new one. I removed the bcm43xx-fwcutter package and installed the b43-fwcutter package. I’m not exactly positive what was up with that. Was the package renamed or changed? I don’t know. All I know is what I did to get it to worked and, sometimes, that’s good enough for me.

So with my internet back, I was finally playing with my system. I mean really, who can use a computer without the internet? Once I leapt over that hurdle, the system seemed pretty nice. I seemed to work well and smoothly.

And then, came the fun part. For reasons unbeknown to me, the default firefox version was changed from 2 to the still beta 3. I did notice pretty quickly that many of the plugins I have been using (and who doesn’t use plugins) weren’t supported on firefox 3. But here is the kick in the pants. Once you run firefox 3, it updates your profile so you can’t use that profile with firefox 2. It’s either start over or deal with version 3 and it’s quirks. Sigh. One of them was my plugin for my del.icio.us account which meant I had no bookmarks. Sigh again. Fortunately, I ran across what is apparently a fairly well known technique. This shows you how to put in a setting to disable the compatibility check that was disabling my precious extensions.

Ah, yes. Lovely bookmarks, contextual menus and search options. I still don’t have a working version of firebug, but on my home machine, I can wait it out until firefox 3 is finally released and support is added. I was all happy as it see that these “unsupported” extensions seemed to work well enough.

Then a couple of days ago, Asa Dotzler put on his blog about a del.icio.us extension version for firefox 3. Ah sweet. I recommend getting it. Not only does it work without tricking the browser, but it’s also a new version with some nice new features. Progress is a good thing.

Overall, I’ve been happy with the upgrade and things have been working smoothly. I just wish the issues I had were addressed a little bit better. I’m not entirely positive my issue with my wireless card was due to anything the ubuntu maintainers did, but I’m not sure that it wasn’t either. As for the firefox issue, I’ve seen repeated reports of people being surprised by it and usually not pleasantly. That one I think could have been handled better.