Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

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For a long time I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the performance of Firefox 2 on my Mac. The Mozilla folk will blame it on plug-ins and such, but I’ve done a lot of tweaking, hacking, and research and it’s just got issues.

The main issue is the memory bleeding. Every other day requires I shut down Firefox and restart it. The second is occasional responsiveness even before the memory leakage fires up. On the Safari side, the new Webkit builds keep getting faster, and being an iPhone user, the consolidation and ease of syncing bookmarks is not without its appeal. This doesn’t mean Firefox is out, the wide selection of plug-ins/add-ons still makes it my go to browser for development and debugging; I’m just trying it in the second string position.

Speaking of plug-ins, this may be the biggest flaw in using Safari: Not a lot of development for plug-ins and not easily extensible. The biggest resource I’ve found so far is a site called Pimp My Safari, which has been helpful, but doesn’t seem to be updated frequently. So I’ve been compiling a list of the features I want/need ported from Firefox to make this browser switch stick:

• Click RSS icon and add to Google Reader or other online reader. Since I access feeds from both my Mac and my iPhone, I use an online reader. I want to easily click that “RSS” icon in the address bar and assign that feed where I want.
• Multiple session session-saver. You can load your last session, but I want the option to save multiple sessions and jump back to a specific ones.
• Some refinement to the very impressive Safari Web Inspector. Namely the ability to click “Inspect” and select a section of the page like Firebug.
• I like to search right from the location bar. My biggest frustration right now is that muscle memory has my typing search terms in and getting a Safari error page.
• A plugin to post directly to Delicious. Bookmarklets are fine, but I want tighter integration, once again like the delicious plugin for Firefox.

I’m sure I’ll find some others and will update this post; I’m only in day two of the test. If you have solutions or know of good plug-ins for Safari, please let me know.

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I do a lot of surfing from my iPhone. When I’ve got some time to kill waiting for a plane or something, reading the blogs I subscribe to is a quick hit of content to pass the time. Google Reader is my feed reader of choice.

Recently, Google introduce an iPhone-specific version of many of its mobile sites. Previously, I just used the default mobile ones. One thing I noticed however is that you can’t use a secure HTTP connection on the Google iPhone version, but you can with the regular Google Reader Mobile one.

Since I sometimes hop on the wireless networks of hotels, conference center, and other networks not under my control, I look for whatever practical ways I can to keep as secure as possible. So for now I just keep the regular mobile version bookmarked and use that. Truth be told, the UI isn’t much different; I’ll forgo the Ajaxy-goodness for now.

If you surf the mobile web, something to be aware of.

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So somehow in a near miss of dropping the iPhone last night, I managed to post a one character tweet on Twitter: “c.” This got me to wondering why someone hasn’t already tried something like a bastardized 26-degrees kind of thing?

For example: If I posted “A,” someone following me might post “@quixado: B,” someone following them might post “@so-and-so: C.” And so on. It’s a lame, but somewhat effective way to discover the reach of your tweets beyond who follows you. I guess if you wanted to be more creative, you could add to a growing narrative like a Twitterized Ficlets. Granted I’m no super-Twitter scholar; I’m liking it because I’m more apt to post things while out and about from my iPhone and like that 140-characters keeps it short and to the point.

Just a thought.

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