applications

I’m using Firefox 3 Beta 3 on both my Ubuntu and Windows systems now.  I had a few problems with Beta 2, but I am sailing well so far with the Beta 3.   I like the new features — the ‘back’ and ‘forward’ arrows were redesigned, and I don’t know why, but I do like the new look.  The arrow graphic reminds me of a switch on some kind of home electronics device now.   The ’smart bookmarks’ is also a nice addition.  Speed and stability have also shown improvements so far.

I got mine from this mozilla page:  www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html

Update:

I forgot to complain that there is no current functionality to match the “tab mix plus” plug-in, which I almost can’t function without, and there’s no current compatibility with the plug-in (or vice versa, more correctly).   So, I don’t have undo closed tabs (for those oops moments), don’t have the (optional) close tab “x” at the far right, that closes the active tab (so you can close, say, 37 tabs in quick succession without having to hunt for the active tab), don’t have session save and recover control, and I can’t see all my tabs at once (they use the default but turbo-ized for beta3 method of scrolling off to the right).  I really like the multi-row option tab mix plus gives.   If there’s something I can’t see with three rows of tabs at the top, then I’ll surf elsewhere.

Colorful Tabs works nicely, though.   If you haven’t played with the fading of inactive tabs, I’d recommend it (at least if you open near as many tabs at once as I do).

Still, I like Beta 3 — it feels faster, I like the robot, and the trend so far is a good one.

I recently signed up for an account on box.net so that I’d have another way to store and transfer files between sites. Currently, you can get 1GB of space with the free basic account, but you aren’t allowed to upload files over 10MB. This is fine as long you’re uploading photos, but more problematic if you’ve got larger files.

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Changing my default mail client in Ubuntu turned out to be one of the easiest config changes I’ve ever made in Linux. In Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), the default mail application is Evolution, and I had been putting off changing this to the application I really used — Mozilla’s Thunderbird — because (based on past experience with desktop Linuxes) I was expecting this to be a painful process. Ultimately, I didn’t have to touch Firefox (my default browser, from which I’m launching ‘mailto’ events), I didn’t have to manually edit any configuration files, and I didn’t even have to look very far.

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