Safari 4 – Some Initial Observations

Apple released the public beta of its Safari 4 browser (which was made available for Windows users two yrs ago) yesterday. I’ve been using Safari 3 ever since it released but the usage is limited to WordPress (which, after its recent upgrade, looks much better on Safari than on Firefox), Apple Trailers, Flickr and few other infrequently-visited sites.

Safari 4 boasts of ~150 features amongst which there quite a few new ones…that is to say, new to Safari! Firefox, Chrome and Opera users will find these ‘new features’ quite ubiquitous. As is my habit, I’ll list out a few ‘sore points’ that make the Safari 4 experience a bit dampening (IMHO, of course):

WordPress 2.7 – Initial ‘Bugs’ [Posted via QuickPress]

WordPress 2.7 has been rolled out across all the WP.com blogs and though its too early to start loving/hating the dashboard outlay, I see it still needs some rework.

Few of the anomalies I’ve noticed are:

• ‘Recent Drafts’ section shows the posts’ date as ‘January 1, 1970′ – the UNIX time. Maybe some synchronization issues.

• Once the navigation pane is minimized to just icons (on the left of the dashboard), hovering the mouse on the ‘Home’ icon opens up the dashboard sub-menu. But this doesn’t work within the ‘Blog Surfer’ section!

• The Blue-colored buttons are not rounded and not aligned properly (CSS issue?)

• Try as I might, I can’t move the ‘QuickPress’ box around the dashboard

GMail Redesigned – Firefox Extension

Circa 2004. Google Mail debuts as an invitation-only Beta.

Early 2007. Google Mail opens up for public registration.

Late 2007. Google Mail is upgraded.

During all this time, I and many others have been using the same interface of GMail. Of course, some bits and pieces were changed here and there (esp. on the sidebar). Then came along Userstyles which allows to change the display of web pages in Firefox by tweaking the CSS. Stylish is a FF extension that did all the nifty look-changing work. All one had to do is get hold of a visual style (which was nothing but a CSS file) and load it into stylish and voila! the look of GMail was changed. Thanks to Harsh, I was introduced to this userstyle (GMail Redesigned by Globex Designs) which by far was the coolest looking one I’ve come across! I’ve been using it ever since but with the advent of FF 3, some of the CSS began to break and the look and feel was lost somewhat!

Enter GMail Redesigned v.0.1. This time its neatly packaged into a Firefox extension (.xpi) which is available via the Mozilla Addons page and once its downloaded and installed, it resides on your FF statusbar. Allow it to update the stylesheet once and you’re good to go. GMail will be a different experience altogether – visually, that is! And yeah, it also has a style for Google Calendar. Keep in mind that the layout is all black and gray…so if you’re the types who likes bright and rosy colours, this ain’t for you. See the screenshots here before you decide to use it.

ScribeFire Test

So its been a while since the Blogging extension for Firefox – Performancing – has been re-christened as ScribeFire but I got the extension updated just a while ago!

So basically this post is just to test the Scribing functionality of ScribeFire! BTW, what sort of name is ScribeFire? Like how one can Scribe from Firefox??

Powered by ScribeFire.

urlclassifier3.sqlite woes on Firefox 3

Ever since I’ve started using Firefox 3, I’ve been noticing that the ‘profile folder’ (where FF stores all the user’s personal info, extensions info etc) was steadily growing in size. Right from my initial usage of Firefox, I’ve not been using the default folder path for this profile but using the firefox -p startup option, create a Firefox_Profile folder at a different location so that the personalization could be carried over from version to version. 

With Firefox 3, this profile folder started to bloat in size very often. Whilst with FF2 it was almost always nearabout 50 megs, with FF3 it grows to ~100 MB after a few hours of browsing. I looked into the individual files and bam! the culprit stood out to be a urlclassifier3.sqlite file which was topping out at 68 MB . Alarmed at this, I Googled around and found this Mozilla Knowledge Base article on the same.

The urlclassifier2.sqlite file contains information on known phishing sites that is used to warn you should you visit one. The information is downloaded by default from a Google database once a day. This functionality can be modified or turned off in “Tools → Options → Security

Firefox 3 contacts Google at each startup to get an updated list of known phishing websites and updates the same in the urlclassifier3.sqlite file. Agreed this is what makes our browser safe and secure but why is it bloating up in size? Are the phishing sites on the web increasing as fast as the size of this folder? Naah! Apparently, there’s a known bug in FF specific to this urlclassifier file which says that it has a lot of vacuum/blank space within and there ought to be a mechanism to automatically compress it effectively.