Spawner in the Works

I have started using Firefox 3.6 and it does feel a little faster than its predecessor, though it's definitely not as snappy as Chrome. I should note that this is how Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 also felt at the time of their release, only to not feel that fast as time wore on and we received successive security and stability updates. I wonder why.

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Google Chrome on Slackware

Google Chrome has been out for a while now, but only on Windows. There are pre-release Linux builds of Chrome, but they work out-of-the-box only on Ubuntu or Debian. As a Slackware 12.1 user, I couldn't therefore check out this browser and I was too lazy to build it myself. Fortunately for me, it turns out that the available builds can be made to work on Slackware with a little effort. Chrome turns out to be surprisingly usable and fast on Linux. That said, I'm not shifting from Firefox to Chrome yet, at least not right away.

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Readability

I get to read a lot of articles on-line thanks to feeder web-sites like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News and Arts & Letters Daily. Many of these articles have web-pages that are very "noisy" in that they have advertisements, logos, unrelated links, snippets of arbitrary text, etc. In addition they often have uncomfortably small fonts and are broken into several short web-pages. These make it quite difficult to read such articles. Fortunately there is now a magic wand I can wave over them to make them more readable.

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Firefox 3

I have been using the release candidates of Firefox 3 on Linux for some time now. The experience has been quite good so far. I would encourage you to try it out for yourself - in fact, download it on the 17^th of June and help Mozilla set a world record.

Firefox 3 comes with quite a lot of fixes and improvements. The "Field Guide to Firefox 3" is a nice page summarising the more important improvements. It seems to have improved a lot in terms of memory usage and speed. You just have to use Gmail to see the difference in speed for yourself. Since I never open too many tabs, use too many extensions or keep the browser open for too long, I have never personally run into memory-usage issues with previous releases of Firefox and I can't really say if the improvements in this area are that drastic.

One of the more important fixes for Indian users of Firefox on Linux is its improved support for complex text layout, which is used in quite a few Indic scripts. I have complained about it before and I am happy to report that it now seems to work fairly well:

Devanagari Text Rendering on Linux: Firefox 2 (left) v/s Firefox 3 (right)

The composite screen-shot above shows the difference between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 when rendering Devanagari text (from Josh18) under Linux. I have circled some of the words that were rendered incorrectly by Firefox 2 and correctly by Firefox 3. (Click on the image above to see a larger version.)

It has not been all wonderful though. There are still some issues that make my experience with Firefox 3 less than ideal. The most egregious of these is how some web pages using Flash either cause Firefox 3 to freeze up or just crash with a segmentation fault (of course, this could be due to a badly-written Flash Player plug-in). The other issue that has persisted from Firefox 2 but now seems to have become worse for me is how Firefox would just freeze for a second or so every now and then, especially noticeable while scrolling up and down large web pages. This might be related to garbage-collection cycles, but I am not sure about it.

Incidentally while Firefox 3 itself mercifully does not require GNOME (I am a happy KDE-only user), its new crash-reporting tool does need a few of the GNOME libraries. This tool is now based on Google Breakpad. I found that the crash reporting tool itself would crash while trying to send a crash report to Mozilla. That was fixed only after I installed GConf, ORBit, libIDL, D-Bus and dbus-glib. It still failed to send the crash reports and it turned out that I must also install and configure Curl. Of course, ordinary Linux users with a typically-bloated Linux distribution would not run into such issues.

By the way, there is now a new pseudo-URL named "about:crashes" that would let you to lovingly admire the crash reports that your instance of Firefox has generated and submitted to Mozilla.

Tools for Indians by Google Labs India

The Google Labs India folks have just announced a couple of cool new tools for Indians. This includes being able to search in a number of Indian languages as well as a transliteration tool for easily typing in Devanagari using an ordinary keyboard.

The transliteration tool is especially nice. For example, it automatically converts "ramesh" to "रमेश". If you did not want the word automatically put in by the tool, you can select the desired word from a set of alternatives or explicitly type it out yourself.

Note that you might have to tweak things a little to correctly display Indic scripts.

Update (2007-08-23): QuillPad seems to have been in existence for some time now and has support for more Indian languages than the Google transliteration tool (which only supports Hindi at the moment).

Update (2007-08-29): Raftaar also allows you to search in Hindi using a transliterating interface.

StanChart Sees the Light

Among the financial institutions I deal with and whose online facilities I use regularly, Citibank India, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank have had great support for Firefox. The only exception was Standard Chartered India who did not seem to want to support anything other than IE or Netscape Communicator 4. I had pointed this out to their Customer Service several times and even pointed out where in their JavaScript code they were making the mistake, but I was always presented with a verbose, albeit nicely written, message asking me to just use the supported browsers and stop ranting. Needless to say, I was irritated and frustrated.

To my pleasant surprise, I discovered last week that they had silently started supporting Firefox as well. Perhaps it came about because a lot of their developers themselves use Firefox; perhaps a lot of customers actually complained; perhaps they saw that by most accounts, Firefox has around 8-10% of the "browser marketshare". Whatever be the reason, I am happy. It is also heartening to note that a lot of sites these days increasingly seem to just work with Firefox instead of requiring IE.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

New Software

SeaMonkey is the new avatar of the Mozilla Application Suite, kept alive by people who prefer the old monolithic application approach to the new approach of having standalone browser (Firefox), mail client (Thunderbird), etc. components. SeaMonkey has just released 1.0 Beta. I personally prefer the old approach as well, but have decided for the moment to not switch back from Firefox/Thunderbird simply because I have now become quite used to these applications and have begun to rely on some of the superb extensions created by the community for them.

QEMU 0.8.0 is out (as is VMWare Player 1.0). By the way, QEMU can be easily used to create virtual machine discs for use with VMWare Player. However, I still prefer to use QEMU.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

SPAM

I made the mistake of inadvertently posting a single message to comp.compilers using my office email address and within a day I was being spammed hard! That account had remained SPAM free for almost three years and it is rather painful to see it in the hands of these idiots. Thankfully, Thunderbird is getting better and better every day at detecting this SPAM, so there is some relief.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Digital Nirvana

Apple, Google and Microsoft want to liberate us from the tyranny of folders and file names. You would never have to remember the name of a file or the folder in which you put it in to retrieve it. In a way, this is already how a lot of us use the Internet - I for one, just Google for a page rather than bookmark it and try to locate it within my labyrinthine bookmarks folder. This is good and I appreciate it. However, unlike the World Wide Web, your desktop PC would some time run out of disc space. When that happens, you can either just buy another hard disc or try to clean your existing hard disc. If you choose the latter, how do you find stuff you do not want? These tools make it easy for you to find stuff you want but not what you do not want.


IBM has created a Universal Virtual Computer to solve the problem of digital decay. Does any one else think this is an overkill? Is using well-documented document or image formats with portable reference reader implementations not good enough? What is to stop subtle errors in porting the UVC to new platforms from preventing the documents to be displayed as originally intended?


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

PGP Public Key

I now have my own PGP Public Key (Key Identifier: 6C114B8F, Key Fingerprint: D6E5 B9C2 5522 ED3D 09DC 3B40 61BD 61C7 6C11 4B8F) that I will try to use with my email messages. Of course, this will not work with the web interfaces provided by Gmail and Hotmail, but it works nicely with Thunderbird using the Enigmail extension. I have published this key to a couple of keyservers. I do not foresee being able to participate in a Free Software hackers' key-signing party any time soon, but I have signed the keys from Mark Wielaard, Michael Koch and Andrew Haley for whatever it is worth.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Miscellany

I come back from a two-week vacation in Bhopal and find that GNU Classpath crosses a million lines of source code and that Tom has done the big GNU Classpath merge into libgcj that should make importing changes from GNU Classpath much easier than before. I also found out that people were still discussing the semantics of overflow of signed integers in C on the GCC list and that Zack Weinberg has left GCC development.

Daniel Berlin has set up an automated patch queue for GCC patches. All you have to do now is to include a line like:

:ADDPATCH java:

in your patch message and it would be added to the patch queue for the area "java". Cool!

Nvu, the new incarnation of Mozilla Composer and a standalone program like Firefox and Thunderbird, has reached version 1.0. I took it for a spin and was able to easily create a few nice-looking HTML documents. Apparently it also supports CSS, XHTML, etc. but I don't know much about them yet to find out how good it is at supporting them.


After having ignored all this while the RSS and other feed aggregation capabilities of Mozilla Thunderbird, I now find this feature absolutely indispensible and liberating. Now I can waste even more of my time reading weblogs and sites that I otherwise would not have bothered to visit with such regularity.


Barry Andrews became yet another person to let out a primal cry of joy and pride after he successfully built GCJ 4.0.1 for Win32 by following my document. Based on his suggestions, I have refactored the document a bit and have highlighted some of the more important points.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Worm Bites Hard

Once again, my Hotmail account is being hammered really hard by a burst of spam almost all of it containing the payload for the WORM_SOBER.S worm! Unlike Gmail, Hotmail doesn't show me the IP address from where the message was received unless there is an explicit "X-Originating-IP" header, so I can't trace it to its origins. The irritating thing is that Hotmail already knows that the payload is a worm and thus refuses to let me download the attachment. Why can't they give me an option to tell them to delete such mails immediately upon receipt?

The rate of incoming junk is far higher than previous such bursts and I have to constantly keep cleaning my mailbox. Interestingly, some of the forged sender addresses indicate that someone reading the GCC list has been infected hard - I can't imagine how else the worm would have got hold of the email addresses of such a disproportionately large number of GCC hackers as well as so many CS-related sites.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Firefox: 50,000,000 Users and Counting

Firefox has been downloaded by at least50 million users worldwide. Awesome! Congratulations to the Firefox hackers for creating such a wonderful browser loved by so many people.

I hope some ostriches get their heads out of the sand and take a look at the world around them. :-/

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Broadband Ahoy!

After many a pestering call and almost two months of waiting, I finally have BSNL's DataOne broadband connection. At 256Kbps it is hardly that "broad" a band, but it is so much better than the old dial-up connection as well as those peddled by most of the competing service providers! BSNL is owned by the Indian government and used to suffer from the usual red-tapism and apathy. In recent times however, it has improved vastly and has become quite competitive with the private telecom operators. By the way, the main reason I went with BSNL instead of the private operators was that most of them used to actively block outgoing connections to several network ports (including tcp/6667 for IRC) in the name of "security" while BSNL does not (so far) have any such restrictions. What's the point of an always-on broadband connection if you can't even chat?

Another very cool thing about BSNL's package is that you get a Huawei SmartAX MT880 ADSL modem-cum-router that has a built-in firewall and is rather cheap at Rs 2000/- for outright purchase. All you need is an Ethernet card. At the moment, the private operators are nowhere close to giving such a deal.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)