I’ve had it with Firefox 3. What should be a relatively lo-fi experience of ‘browsing the internet’ seems to be the most difficult task for this browser to handle. Maybe it’s trying to do to much and forgetting that is the core Firefox role?

For the past few weeks every 30 seconds of browsing time is punctuated by an annoying 3 second pause (beachball) as the browser plays catch up with itself. This tends to happen during the funny bits in YouTube videos or crucially when I press 'Proceed' in a checkout.

Maybe it’s deliberate?

The most recent spate of issues center around the browser totally smashing my computer’s processor. The fans kick in and everything grinds to a halt. Any input in any application takes forever and is only fixed by pressing the blue button below.

What gives? Don’t get me wrong — I see the potential in the browser — I love the new bookmark tagging and plug-ins (I only run a couple btw) but if this hinders the core process of accessing the internet then sorry — but it’s time to uninstall. That has to be the drastic measure — by keeping it on my hard drive, instinct will surely make me fire it up again.

So where next? Maybe… I might give Camino a whirl. It’s by Mozilla and is pretty decent. I might also give Flock a try. It’s a social networking aware browser which seems quite interesting. Or it’s back to Safari — but for some reason it isn’t storing my passwords correctly… sheesh!

For those ready to defend Firefox — I'm running on a 2.2Ghz Core Duo Macbook with 10.5 & 4gigs of RAM — should be more than plenty!

Holy shit — I didn't even know this was even possible: play Defender inside a website’s favicon (that’s the icon in the browser bar......... that er....... we don’t have *cough*)

Best thing I've ever seen on the web lately!

Check it out...

It's been a while since my last post this is mainly due to the fact that we have been very busy over here at TAK! towers, working on both client projects as well as a few of our own.

When developing new projects we like to investigate and use various technologies that we feel are best suited to the project and so we get to play with quite a lot. Recently we have been having a good look at the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC (Currently on preview 4) follow the link for more information - in our opinion this is shaping up to be a very welcome addition to the .NET framework.

As we investigate this further we are going to start posting source code and snippets of our findings and also linking to articles which we think are useful.

Kuler, the colour sampling tool from Adobe has had a update recently and now allows you to upload an image and create a colour theme from that image. Pretty cool stuff.

Nice interface too.

And a whole lot more, like; CSS based animations, client side SQL storage and more. This fills me with excitement and should hopefully increase the number of users of this great web browser*.

I look forward to this new version with anticipation.

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* Yes — that's right Neil (before you leave a comment) I said great! I really like Safari and hope that by bringing it up to scratch with tomorrows standards the browser has a great future. For me it outperforms Firefox when it comes to speed and system resources. Not sure about how it performs on a PC. But then again, why would I want to? Ha ha ha ha!

Thermo is a new development application by Adobe for designers to assist in the build of web based projects. Heard many promises many times for applications that can do away with the developer — will be interesting how this pans out. Looks good in my initial opinion…

Thermo by Adobe 

Wow!

Now this is interesting — a memory card with built in Wi-Fi allowing you to insert into your camera, take pics and broadcast to your camera or (certain) photo sharing websites. Pretty swish. Find out more…

• “Introduced on Thursday, the bill--titled the Communications Legislation Amendment (Crime or Terrorism Related Internet Content) Bill 2007--would empower the federal police to alter the "blacklist" of sites that are currently prohibited by the Communications and Media Authority.
  
  The list currently includes pornography and "offensive material." However, under the amendment, federal police would be able to add other sites to the list, including content that the AFP Commissioner "has reason to believe...is crime- or terrorism-related content."
  
  The definition of material that may be liable for censorship includes Internet content that "encourages, incites or induces," "facilitate(s)" or "has, or is likely to have, the effect of facilitating" a crime”

This is quite shocking to hear as it’s a small step in the wrong direction. What will be deemed offensive and unacceptable in the future? Freedom of speech and freedom to publish is the very essence of the Web. Will this movement eventually halt file sharing websites? Or, for example, would a site like StickerNation have been blocked as it promoted illegal activities?

Perhaps the most shocking part is that this is in Australia. Coming to a democracy near you real soon.

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I see the future… and it looks colourfull… I can only dream of web development on something like this…

Link here