Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Opera 9.5 and Google Chrome

Opera launched Opera 9.5 which fixed a lot of the issues that I had mentioned earlier. The most important change made, which fixes a long standing quarrel I had with Opera, was that an option was added to switch to the next tab after closing the current one. This makes Opera's behavior consistent with that of most other major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc.) Here are some issues that still prevent me from making Opera my default browser:

Lack of a "Safari" style RSS reader: The Opera RSS reader uses the each-RSS-item-is-an-email model. I prefer the Safari (or IE7 or Firefox with Sage) each-feed-is-a-rendered-page model.

Can't move Personal Bar next to the menu: This is just a convenient space saver. In Firefox, I can move the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox right next to the menu. Thus giving me some more browsing space while retaining quick access to my favorite bookmarklets.

Adblock and UserJS UI primitive compared to Firefox: While Opera does possess ad blocking and user scripting capabilities, the UI exposed for both is very primitive as compared to Firefox. For example, there is no easy way to white-list websites using the Opera content blocker.

No built-in spell checking: While spell checking can be enabled in Opera, it is not at seamless and easy to use as the spell checking built into Firefox and Safari.

Firefox is catching up: One of Opera's most compelling and unique features was the full page zoom. Unfortunately, with the release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla has replicated this very useful feature in Firefox and made it more useful by adding the capability to remember the zoom level for each website. And Opera's other selling point, speed, is also being threatened thanks to Mozilla initiatives such as Tracemonkey.

When it comes to speed, Google claims that it's freshly launched Chrome browser is the fastest. However, Chrome also comes with a most unique feature that no other browser possesses (well, except maybe IE 8:) per tab processes and a browser task manager.

It also steals features from:
  • Firefox
    • Instant bookmarks
  • Firefox extensions
  • Safari
    • Incognito Mode = Private Browsing
  • Opera
    • One box for everything = Opera 9.5 address bar
    • New tab page = Speed Dial
Of course, Chrome is beta and has a lot of issues which prevent it from being a contender for default browser. Some glaring examples include:

Closing the last tab closes the browser: Closing the application should only happen when the user clicks on the big red X at the top right corner or chooses exit from the File menu.

Lack of web feed support: RSS feeds, Atom feeds etc. mean nothing to Chrome. Hopefully a feed capable version will be available soon.

No built-in spell checking: A must for all bloggers.

Extended Validation Certificate UI is lacking: While Chrome supports EV certificates, the UI used to display them is primitive compared to Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.

Installs in Local Application Data directory instead of Program Files: This is a big issue. It effectively means that every user will have to install and run his own copy of Chrome. There are many other negative ramifications of this decision. This thread on the Chrome Google Group has details.

Website Issues: Certain websites are slow and buggy. Facebook and Hotmail are two major ones.

Crashes: For a browser that is supposed to be crash resistant by design, I have had it crashing a decent number of times. Look at this thread. And finally,

No Adblock: Chrome lacks an ad blocker. While it seems unlikely that Google will ever release one, Chrome is open source, so perhaps we will see a third party extension soon.

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Posted by Hob Gadling | 2:09 PM |  0 comments |

Friday, August 31, 2007

Useful Freeware

Here's a list of some new freeware that I found useful.

WinSplit Revolution
An intuitive, keyboard-based window arranging utility. Essential if you have a large widescreen monitor. (I just got a Dell 2407-HC at work!)

TeraCopy
A Windows file copying tool that supports pause-resume and error recovery.

doPDF
A PDF printer for Windows that doesn't depend on Ghostscript. A leaner (1.29MB only!) and faster replacement for PDFCreator.

ASAP Utilities
An Excel add-in that lets you do stuff like deselect cells from selection, apply formula to selected cells and a lot more.

Recuva
A tiny file unerase utility. Leave copy on a USB stick so you can run it without having to install.

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Posted by Hob Gadling | 3:21 PM |  1 comments |

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

10 Things Broken In Apple Safari on Windows

Apple released Safari 3 Beta for Windows with a lot of fanfare. Unfortunately they did a lot of things wrong. Other people have already written extensively about the lack of ClearType support and crashes. Here are 10 other things that Apple did wrong.
  1. Can't add custom search engines. Firefox, IE7 and Opera all support this.
  2. Double clicking on the tab bar to create a new tab doesn't work. Works in Firefox, IE7 and Opera. (Neither is there a New Tab button that I can drag to the tab bar.)
  3. Ctrl-Enter in the address bar doesn't autocomplete to www. .com. Neither does Shift-Enter to www. .net nor Ctrl-Shift-Enter to www. .org. Firefox supports all three and IE7 and Opera support the first. Opera can be customized to support all three.
  4. Middle clicking on a tab doesn't close it. Works on Firefox, IE7 and Opera. Perhaps because Macs don't have middle buttons? (Opera's problematic close behavior has been blogged about before.)
  5. Can't close the last tab. You can in Firefox and Opera.
  6. Grabs IE and Firefox bookmarks by default but doesn't display them in the Bookmarks menu. Doesn't grab Opera bookmarks.
  7. Doesn't use the standard RSS icon. Firefox, IE7 and Opera all do.
  8. Doesn't follow Windows UI conventions. Cannot resize using any border.
  9. Breaks Fitt's Law! There is a one pixel hole in the maximized Safari at the top right corner. Moving the mouse to the top right corner and clicking closes the maximized window underneath Safari!
  10. Complex font rendering broken e.g. Devanagari
(As an aside, here's a fancy nickname to use for Safari, in the same vein as Internet Exploder, Mozilla Firesux and Crapera -- Apple Suckari!)

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Posted by Hob Gadling | 5:11 PM |  3 comments |

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Why Opera makes me weep

Opera 9.20 is out and it features another great innovation from the Opera developers: Speed Dial.

And yet, in spite of Opera being faster, leaner and slicker than Firefox, I'm still forced to use Firefox as my default browser. Let's explore why:

Broken Tabbed Browsing
Opera fanatics love to point out that Opera was the first mainstream browser to feature tabbed browsing. Unfortunately Opera's tabbed browsing model Just Doesn't Work™. Here's how I use tabbed browsing in Firefox (or IE7 for that matter.)
1. Visit Digg.com
2. Scan through the front page and middle click on the stories I'm interested in to them open them in background tabs.
3. Select the tab for the first story I had opened and read the story.
4. Close the tab by clicking on the little X on the tab.
5. Firefox takes me to the next tab i.e. the next story I had wanted to read. IE7 does the same. Opera unfortunately takes me back to the Digg.com front page i.e. the parent tab. Which is downright stupid.

Sadly there is no real way to fix this. You can install a custom button which does "Close page & Switch to next page", you can change the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-F4 to do the same, you can even set up a mouse gesture to do this. But for some stupid reason you cannot assign this to the little red X on each tab or even to the middle-click on each tab. And I'm so used to browsing this way that change is not possible. In fact, I shouldn't have to change. Programs should change to behave like users expect, users shouldn't have to change their behaviors for programs.

Lack of a "Safari" style RSS reader
The Opera RSS reader uses the each-RSS-item-is-an-email model. I prefer the Safari (or IE7) each-feed-is-a-rendered-page model. Firefox let's me chose either using appropriate extensions. (I have to admit that this isn't that much of a problem since the arrival of web-based RSS readers like PageFlakes and NetVibes.)

Lack of an easy way to emulate IE/Firefox keyboard shortcuts
"Ctrl +" for zooming in, "Ctrl -" for zooming out, "Ctrl 0" for zooming 100%, "Ctrl Enter" for "www. .com" completion, "Shift Enter" for "www. .net" completion, "Ctrl Shift Enter" for "www. .org" completion, entering search terms in the URL bar for an I'm Feeling Lucky search. This is stuff I'm used to. I'm aware that I can customize Opera to do all this, but perhaps there should be a simple one-click way of doing this. Again, programs should change to behave like users expect, users shouldn't have to change their behaviors for programs.

That's all the rants I have for Opera. This a huge improvement over my earlier list, and I can see that Opera is now a lot closer to being the perfect browser. All Firefox will have to do to be the perfect browser is to be as fast and as memory efficient as Opera. Tough order.

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Posted by Hob Gadling | 11:36 AM |  1 comments |

Friday, November 24, 2006

Breathing life (part 2) - Applications

Here's a list of applications that I've installed so far. This list will grow as I add more stuff. Update: List was updated on Sept 4, 2007 - some entries were deprecated and some URLs were fixed.

(Ubuntu blocker: Program that prevent me from switching to Ubuntu Linux completely)

Archivers
Video Tools
Audio Tools
Download Management
Security
Instant Messaging
Browser
CD Burning
Imaging
Utilities
Editors
Antivirus / Antispyware
Interesting, everything in that list except Nero and Kaspersky is open source or closed source freeware.

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Posted by Hob Gadling | 2:42 AM |  3 comments |

Monday, August 07, 2006

Free CD utilities

While applications like Nero Burning ROM and Sonic Easy CD Creator are the Swiss army knives of CD burning and reading, here's a list of small utilities which do only a few things each but do them well.

Burrrn
Burrrn burns audio CDs. That's all it does but does it so well that it deserves a download. It can decode mp3, aac, ogg and more, it has built in support for ReplayGain so you can burn CDs that will not fluctuate wildly in volume from one track to the next and it creates CDs with CD-Text so that you can see the track details on most modern CD players.

Exact Audio Copy
Exact Audio Copy is a well-respected program which can rip audio from damaged CDs which other CD rippers like iTunes and Winamp can't handle. While the interface isn't quite as intuitive as the competition, the startup configuration wizard is pretty good. The HydrogenAudio wiki page has some great documentation on how to correctly configure and use it. If you really want to be geeky and ensure that you are getting perfectly copied CDs you can download the AccurateRip dll and compare your results with hundreds of other geeks who submit their results to the AccurateRip site.

ImgBurn
ImgBurn burns CD or DVD images. While this might seem a trivial ability as most other CD burning software can do this, ImgBurn can handle many possible disk image formats apart from the usual ISO and has many other advanced features especially for DVD video burning. The recently released version 2.0 also has the capability of creating disk images from files stored on disk.

Isobuster
Isobuster is to data CDs what Exact Audio Copy is to audio CDs. This program can successfully recover data from scratched, incorrectly burned and otherwise defective CDs. As an added bonus you can also use it to mount disk images and extract data from them. Quite useful if you need just a few specific files from a disk image and don't want to waste a CD burning it. Isobuster has a shareware pro-version ($25) which adds data recovery from UDF CDs.

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Posted by Hob Gadling | 9:06 PM |  1 comments |