I was a bit inspired by a post in the Linux G+ community I saw this morning and thought I’d make a quick post here to discuss my own reasons why I use Linux.
One thing I’ve learned in my years of being a part of the Linux and Open Source community is that everybody comes to it in their own way, for their own reasons, and they stick with it for their own reasons. As a longtime Linux and Open Source user, I am no exception to this.
Since I’ve been cycling continuously between the three browsers that annoy me the least lately (Opera, Firefox 3.6, and Chromium), I’ve been utilizing each browser’s extensibility to make it a bit more usable.
In a previous post, I discussed the various things I do to recent releases of Firefox to make it behave itself. In this post, I’ll be discussing the process I go through with the Chromium browser, namely with respect to extensions (since there really isn’t much one can configure in Chromium natively).
Back in early June of this year, most likely scrambling to steal some of the thunder from Apple’s musical cloud offering announcement, Google had announced their own cloud-centric approach to music, which they simply called Google Music.
At the time, considering that there was no Linux client, an only barely-functional interface and muddy limitations on the framework they’d hastily set up, it was clear that this was premature. Appropriately, given the look of it, I had dismissed Google Music out of hand as a non-item.
However, in the intervening weeks, something happened. It got better.
So in keeping with the direction the devs at Mozilla have been steering the Firefox browser, plans include more feature assassination (of course), this time in the form of obfuscating useful information — arguably the most important information for users of a web browser — in the address bar.
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For the last year and some change, I’ve gone from using Opera as my primary browser to using Mozilla Firefox. I have a variety of reasons for this switch, and it was a somewhat gradual one, but as I detailed in a recent post, despite it being my browser of choice, I still feel that it has a lot of shortcomings, and as such, it needs a lot of tweaking out-of-the-box before I find it usable.
So this is a writeup of the things I do to Firefox — in this particular case Firefox 4 — immediately after I install it. It used to be a much shorter list, but these days it’s getting more and more involved, so this writeup is as much for my own purposes, as a checklist of sorts, as it is to share my thoughts with others on how to tweak Firefox 4.
I got up this morning and saw this, which led me to a pretty serious WTF moment, all before having my morning coffee.
From the article:
Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner confirmed the fact that an x64 flavor of Firefox won’t be added to the existing x86 version, per the 32-bit/64-bit Internet Explorer 8 model.
Firefox users should not despair though. Fact is that Mozilla hasn’t given up on delivering a 64-bit version of Firefox, just not with Firefox 4.0.
This implies that maybe there will be a 64-bit release for Firefox 4.1? Maybe? 4.2? 5.0? Will there be one at all? Ever?
I think that they should probably be a little more open about when there will be, and why there’s a delay.
In my ongoing search for something with which to tinker, I’ve occasionally run across the Midori browser, a fully GTK+2 integrated, WebKit-based browser with a focus on being lightweight and simple.
It had been a while since I gave Midori a try, so I thought that since they had released a few updated versions since my last look, I’d install it and give it a new look, because it seemed to have some promise the last time.
I did most of my testing on my 64-bit Mint 9 laptop, and I installed Midori 0.2.6, which was the version in the repositories. I used it for a week as my primary browser, only resorting to Firefox when I had to do something that I couldn’t get to work in Midori, which is my usual approach to evaluating browsers.
I’ve lamented since last year that KDE’s radical change in direction left me — and a lot of others — going on an app-hunt. I’m really not a fan of the new Amarok, and I’ve been as yet unsuccessful in finding something to replace my beloved Amarok 1.4, even resorting to procedures like this one to install the old version.
Such procedures make a good stopgap for the time being, but sooner or later, that old thing will simply not work anymore. Once a program falls out of development, the clock is ticking on it remaining useful, and at that point, you have to face reality and find something with which to replace it.
Fortunately, I’m not the only Amarok 1.4 lover out there. It’s been forked, and the new version is called Clementine.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that despite my open source advocacy, I’m still a longtime user of the Opera browser.
However, the past year has been pretty rocky in that respect; Opera 10.10 for Linux was plagued with a lot of bugs, crashes, and performance issues, rendering it practically unusable, even for an Opera fan such as myself, and despite 10.50 being released for other platforms in March, the Linux world was stuck with the problematic 10.10 (and eventually 10.11) release until this week.
Finally, after such a long wait, Opera 10.60 was finally released for all platforms on July 1st, so I was finally able to ditch Firefox and Chrome and go back to my browser of choice.
Or was I?
As many of you are already aware, Google Chrome stable was released for the Linux platform on May 25th.
Google Chrome has been one of the fastest growing browsers, and a stable release for Linux has been a long time coming. I’ve played around with beta releases and found them so unstable as to be unusable as recently as just a few months ago, so needless to say, I was pretty interested in seeing what a release for Linux marked “stable” was like.
I’ve been using it as my primary browser since May 25th, so I decided I’d do a brief writeup of what I think of the experience so far.
The Linux Critic 