Fish, Insect, and Mozilla

[avram]

Didn’t do much today. I went out in the late afternoon for some food, picked up some visual reference books at Barnes & Noble (the Fish and Insect books from the DK Eyewitness series of kids’ books, lots of big color photos), then came back home and poked around with my computer some more.

I’m using Mozilla as my primary browser now. It’s a mixed bag. I like the tabs a lot, but smart browsing works much better under MSIE. I just installed the OSX version of Default Folder to make disk navigation easier; it’s useful enough that I’ll probably wind up paying the $35 shareware fee.

And I just found my copy of Alarums & Excursions #326, so now I can finish writing comments for next issue. Yay!

Comments

[almeda.livejournal.com]

What's smart browsing supposed to do, anyway? I've never bothered to turn it on. Likewise, I'm adoring Mozilla's tabs. And there's a toolbar for it I got at http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/prefbar/ that's HELLA useful. It lets me turn off javascript with a checkbox that's always there, and spoof my UA into anything I like with a pulldown. Also, it has a 'clear cache' button right there (useful, given my work's stupid firewall caching).

[avram]

Smart browsing is basically auto-completion for your address bar. The way it works in MSIE (Mac) is you start typing in your address bar, it hunts through your History and Favorites looking for matches in both URLs and Favorites names, and not only sticks the best match in the address bar space (with a moving selection so you can just keep typing if it turns out that you're going for something different) but also pops up a little scrolling menu (that you can navigate with the up and down arrows) with the less-good matches.

The Mozilla version seems to only hunt through History, not Favorites/Bookmarks. And it seems eager to interpret failed matches as Search strings rather than partial domains. Annoying.

Later last night I discovered that Mozilla 1.1 has whatever the opposite of a killer feature is -- it opens up its built-in mail client when I click on a mail link, with no facility for telling it to use an external client. I've read that such a facility is present in betas of 1.2, but I don't feel like downloading another massive file just to do some beta-testing and get a feature that should have been present in version 1.0.