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RSS FeedNovember 13th, 2007
Firefox has problems?? Heaven forbid!
Once upon a time, IE used to dominate the web. People loved it, people hated it, but that was all there was. There was a bit of Netscape, a bit of Mozilla Mosaic, together for a total of whopping 1.6%. Rest was IE.
Complainers would complain – oh IE sucks – oh it is unsafe – oh it is not cool. And crashes, my God, yes the crashes.
Then along came the Firefox, slowly starting to take a bit of share, nibbling at 5%, then up to lower teens, then to 20s, until it came to almost 50%.
Skeptics told us that the same problem that only IE is known to have, will be shown in any browser once it came to take any significant market share. But we wouldn’t have any of it – nossir the problems with IE are caused by evil northwesterly and that by definition cannot affect the flying fire fox. Until the problems started appearing. Today, Firefox has crashed 6 times on me. My list of pains is growing. Only problem is, I have no northwesterly to blame today. So, instead I rant here, and document it thus:
(i) Firefox has a memory bug. Sure, that might be an understatement, but that just needs saying. If I open task manager, I can notice that after a couple of hours, Firefox takes more memory.
(ii) Crashes often.
(iii) When I shut windows, doesn’t automatically shut down, rather “crashes” – then when you start windows, it asks should the session be restored or new session, and there is no way to specify a default.
Overall, I am still sticking with Firefox, considering that it is in active development, and I hope developers will fix these issues soon.
November 13th, 2007
Don’t type in the address bar
Most web users have faced the annoying practice of “domaining” at one time or another. Domaining is that annoying practice of registering domain names that are close to some famous domain names in the hopes of catching some traffic due to people mistyping the web site address. Problems due to domaining can be quite serious and in some cases they can be outright disastrous. As an example, consider a well known website www.gooogle.com and a spurious domain www.googlec.om (Notice the slight mistake). In case the spurious website is a hacker, or an adult website, just a mistype could seriously compromise your computer.
Two ways to prevent problems due to domaining
- One way is to heavily use bookmarks (favorites) to avoid having to type in addresses. The most used websites should be on the bookmarks toolbar (on top in Firefox) or Links (on top in IE).
- When the address is not in the bookmarks, the user should first search for the address in Google/Bing then click on the link from the search result. While this adds an unnecessary first step, in case of typographic error, not following this can precaution be quite disastrous as pointed out earlier.