Firefox 4 Beta

Having had a few issues with my main installation of Firefox I decided that I would upgrade the beat version of Firefox 4.

So far so good and a few of the issues I was having with Firefox seem to have been resolved with version 4. For example I was having issues with text entry in text fields. It was often very slow for no apparent reason, even resetting Firefox and emptying all temporary internet files and the cache wouldn’t resolve it. This now seems to be working fine with version 4.

There is a new look to the user interface and a new style that I quite like.

Overall it’s working for me, but it is beta and as with any beta software I am expecting possible problems in the future, and it would appear that Flash may be the main cause of those problems.

Adobe CS4

After much contemplation, thought and waiting, I have gone out and purchased a copy of Adobe CS4 Master Suite.

I have wanted to upgrade Dreamweaver and Firefox for a while as my previous versions are PPC and have never worked well on my new Intel iMac.

Knowing my luck, Adobe will announce CS5 tomorrow!

A billion downloads of Firefox

There have been a billion downloads of Firefox.

The BBC reports

The open-source browser Firefox passed its billionth download on Friday, ahead of the release of its fourth iteration.

The milestone includes downloads of all versions of the web software since its first release in 2004.

Figures suggest that Firefox now has nearly one third of the browser market worldwide, at 31%.

Though I use other browsers, generally Firefox is the browser I probably use the most. Some of those billion are my downloads.

XP SP3 on the A197XP VAIO

I have been having a few issues installing software on my (old) Sony A197XP VAIO, notably Firefox 3 and iTunes 7.7 (which I wanted to install for MobileMe).

So before I re-install Windows (and all the headaches that will cause me) I decided to try and install XP SP3.

This did install.

I was then able to install Firefox 3.01 and was pleased with that.

However iTunes 7.7 still failed to install.

Not sure where to go now, but looks like I may need to reinstall Windows.

Fast Firefox 3

I have been using Firefox 3 for a while now and I much prefer it over Firefox 2. It’s much faster and more stable than Firefox 2.

Overall well worth upgrading.

Trying to download Firefox 3

Well can I download Firefox 3 on this the launch day?

No!

Everytime I go to the download page, I am only offered Firefox 2.

I will keep trying, but the last time I looked they had passed 1,000,000 downloads and over 1,700,000 people had downloaded Firefox 3.

Well they may have downloaded it, I have had no luck!

Pleaaaasssee be a little faster!

I have no idea why, but my iMac can be so slow at times…

This is a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 2 GB of RAM, so I am guessing that this really should be a fast computer, certainly faster than my old G4 PowerBook!

However at times it slows down to a real crawl, so slow that all I get is the spinning beachball of death!

However all is not lost I know why.

I run too many applications at once and I run them hard.

For example I will usually have three browsers open all with multiple tags. I also visit sites which have lots of javascript and ajax in them (such as WordPress blogs and Jaiku).

I do run a few PowerPC legacy applications (namely Word and Firefox).

I will have iPhoto and iTunes running in the background as well.

I would suspect that running EyeTV and EyeHome in the background also adds to the load.

So it’s not really the iMac’s fault, I know it’s all mine!

In theory what I should do is run a single application only and then open the others as and when I need them.

In theory that is a good idea.

In reality I don’t work that way.

Maybe I need a stack of computers with multiple spaces on a single monitor that allow me to work the way I want to without loading the lot so much so slow it right down to a crawl.

I was downloading a file!

So there I was thinking which office suite I should put on my new Q1 Ultra UMPC. I did consider Office 2003, but of course the Q1 does not have a CD drive, and my external drive is Firewire only. I know I could copy the disk onto an ISO image and that mount that as a virtual drive, or I could share a drive on a network computer, but that sounds like hard work (or so I thought).

I then decided to download and install OpenOffice, okay so it’s an 120MB download, but that won’t take too long, or so I thought.

So I started the download…

Well this according to Firefox is going to take an hour, okay no worries, I’ll leave the Q1 on, the batteries fully charged shouldn’t be a problem.

Left it for a while, did some stuff on the Mac, went back to the Q1  and it was off.

What?

It must have thought, “ah nothing’s happening here, I’d better turn myself off to conserve battery life”.

I was downloading a file!

“nope, mouse hasn’t moved, no taps, no keyboard entry, time to turn off”

I am downloading a file, I don’t want to stare at the screen for an hour, I just want to download the file.

“okay, time to turn myself off”

NO!

“I’m off….”

What about my file? I was downloading a file.

Well that sucks, and of course restarting an interruped download with Firefox means downloading all over again from the beginning.

So here I am now with the power brick plugged in, you’re not very ultra-mobile now are you?

EyeTV Wireless Access

One of the features of EyeTV during a recent update (version 2.5) was the ability to stream recordings wirelessly to an iPhone or an iPod touch.

As at the time I had neither I didn’t either turn it on or check it out.

Now having an iPod touch I gave it a go and was well impressed. It’s simple to turn on, just go to the relevant section in the EyeTV preferences.

EyeTV Wireless Access Preferences

Now what I didn’t realise was that basically what EyeTV does is convert the videos into a format which plays on the iPod touch, but hosts it on the Mac with the EyeTV with a webpage as a front end.

Now that webpage can be viewed on your iPod touch (or iPhone), but also can be viewed on a Mac which is using Safari 3 (the page does not work on Safari 2).

EyeTV Wireless Access on Safari 3

You can also use  Firefox (2.0.0.7) or Camino (1.5.1), clicking on the links plays (streams) the file in Quicktime.

The file plays fine over an 802.11g network.

However it also works on a Windows PC as well, it worked fine on my Windows XP Tablet using Firefox, however it didn’t work on Internet Explorer 6 or on a Vista PC with Internet Explorer 7. Obviously you also need to have Quicktime installed on the PC. Quite a useful way of streaming video across a home network.