02 April 2005 Saturday

Opera and Spring -- mostly unrelated

after running Opera 7.6 for the past many months (even though apparently the latest release is stil 7.54u2… *shrug*) i went ahead and downloaded the new Opera Beta … seems awesome. the one thing Opera can’t touch Firefox on, though, is the Web Developer Extension. aside from that, Opera runs faster and lighter in just about every way. (note: downloading the new beta version does not replace your current installation of Opera.)
also updated Thunderbird from 1.0 to 1.0.2. isn’t that exciting.

a very very rainy day.. started sometime early this morning… the sound you hear outside your window that surely the flowers are being beat down and everything crushed beneath the thundering raindrops…. but they aren’t crushed and they don’t drown; it’s April 2nd — April showers bring May flowers (but what do Mayflowers bring? Pilgrims!) and already the daffodils are out and the early little purple irises promised the larger ones on their way.. and the tall, yellow, feathery-type flower bushes who’s name i have currently forgotten are peeking through bit by bit. so there’s Spring.

another side thought of the moment… regarding a certain lavender box column: css and background graphics are highly uncool. they’re not cooperating for me at moment, and i’ve not yet wrapped my head around a creative solution. but i want it solved!
*update: 3:30pm… solved! annoying, but yay! …now there had better be a way to fix it in IE too.

furthermore on firefox, btw..
i found a note from a MatthewHSE in webmasterworld on tweaking firefox to be faster:

To get started, type “about:config” in your firefox address bar. The settings you’re looking for are:

1.) network.http.pipelining
2.) network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
3.) network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
4.) network.http.proxy.pipelining
5.) nglayout.ititialpaint.delay

Set #1, #2, and #4 to “true”. Set #3 to a high number, like 32. Set #5 to 0.

Enabling the pipelining features allows the browser to make multiple requests to the server at the same time. The “maxrequests” is the maximum number of requests it will send at once. I’ve heard that 8 is the most it will send at once, but setting it higher won’t hurt, just in case. The initialpaint.delay is the length of time (in milliseconds) after the server response before the browser begins to paint the page.

Firefox tuning thread

Furthermore on Opera…
Web Developer Toolbar & Menu for Opera... huh. :)
(i don’t think it had dynamic css editing.. but it’s still better than nothing before.)

and furthermore..
here’s the thing about Opera 8 (so far)… everthing seems pretty nice and reasonably polished.. i’m still not thoroughly used to the new sidepanels format they switched to at some point in the last 3 versions… but the big complaint i have about new Opera 8 (and this is a very big complaint, actually, though it seems such a small thing), is that they seem to have done away with that feature that allowed you to click a tab you are already on, which drops you right to the tab you had most recently used immediately before. i’m not sure how else to describe it.. but it’s a terribly useful feature for hopping back and forth between tabs, and it’s one thing i most missed when i using firefox. why oh why would they have subtracted this functionality?

*another upgrade: installed bblean 113b6 (have been on 112u1). not much change (which is fine) but i do already see that the ‘balloon tips’ for system tray seems to have been added as an integrated feature (matching the skin, too), so the plugin i’d recently found for that is no longer necessary (had been inconsistent anyway).