I’ve been a long time Firefox fanboy. I was one of the 10,000 people who contributed, and had their name featured in the NY Times back in 2004. I’ve long preached to anyone who would listen that Firefox is a better alternative to Internet Explorer, particularly back in the days prior to IE 7.
Then my love affair with Firefox started to end. Firefox 1.5 (and the earlier versions, I started at 0.7) never skipped a beat, and unlike IE it had tabs, which were a god send to me as it was to many others. Mozilla launched Firefox 2.0, and suddenly my internet experience started to sour. I’m a heavy tab user, so it’s not unusual for me to have 15, 20 and even more tabs open, it’s how I read my feeds in the morning, opening up the stories that interest me for later reading. Firefox had what has been called by others “memory leaks,” which in laymen’s terms meant that it tripped out your memory on a PC, froze up and crashed…and far too regularly. I became a Mac user this year, and the first thing I did when I started up OS X for the first time was to download Firefox, hoping that perhaps it was a PC problem. It wasn’t. Same memory problems, same crashes. Mac fanboys told me that it was my fault for using plugins, so I deleted Firefox and started again without the plugins. Same problems, constant freezing (even with 4gb on a MacPro) and crashes. I switched to Safari for a time, and as much as it was a decent browser, it doesn’t play nice with all sites, in particular with the WYSIWIG backend on Wordpress blogs. Then came Flock 1.0. I’d never been a Flock fan before, always believing it to be nothing more than Firefox with plugins (Flock is based on the Firefox engine). Having watched the demo at TechCrunch 40 I downloaded the beta of Flock 1.0 and surfed away without incident. Some how the folks at Flock had tweaked the underlying Firefox engine to stop the memory issues.
I was hoping that Firefox 3.0 might finally fix the blight that was Firefox 2. Firefox 3 Beta 1 has been released for testing (download here) so I fired up Firefox 3 and Flock with the exact same tabs opened, hoping that perhaps Mozilla had finally heard the protests of its loyal user base. The stats (image right) say it all.
It didn’t crash in my testing, but having said that the test was fairly short. Firefox was never a browser to crash immediately, usually teasing the user with functionality for some time before deciding that enough was enough, then freezing or crashing all together some time later.
Others have more positive reviews of Firefox 3. I can only hope that by the time it gets to full release it’s as stable as Firefox 1.5 was.
If you’re looking for a killer app on the Internet and are unwilling to get into pornography, gaming is your best bet. So when Meebo opened their platform last month to third party developers, it was clearly only a matter of time before they let game startups in. That time has come.
Twenty games launched on the service last night, ranging from chess and checkers to Texas Hold ‘em. Launch Meebo chat, click on a friend and start a game. And of course, chat with them real-time while you do it.
Meebo’s goal is to take synchronous, real time events and port them, to the extent possible, to their site. The Tokbox video chat application is a natural fit, as is gaming. Now what I’d really like to see is to video chat with my dad while I lose badly to him in chess. You can’t do that yet, but it’s undoubtedly coming.
Game partners include 3rd Sense, Absolutist, AddictingGames, Clearspring Technologies, Come2Play, Gamebrew, MediaGreenhouse, Mochi Media, MyGraffitiWall, Jiggmin, Kongregate, PlayFirst, Presidio Studios, and ZeroCode. The games available now include AddictingGames’ Fratboy Unicycle Relay, Animal Puzzle, Artillery, Attack, Backgammon, Battle Pool, Blackjack, Checkers, Chess, Connect4, Go, Kongregate Racing, Match4, Music Man, Picture This!, Pirate War, Platform Racing, Reversi, Sheep Me, Sploder, Sudoku Wars, Tactics 100, Texas Hold ‘em, and World Travel Puzzle.
Details on Meebo below.
Comments trolls are the bane of most sites; where as the vast majority of people may never comment on a post (as is certainly the case with TechCrunch) those that do usually fall into one of three categories.
Legitimate commenters, who have something thoughtful to say and/ or add to the conversation (for and against), link spammers who comment on the off chance they might get some traffic as a consequence of their comment (sometimes these fall into the first category..hard to tell) and trolls, who make it their business to criticize anything written and the people who wrote it, in some sort of sad attempt at self validation by being nasty towards others for the sake of it. Like taking drugs, trolling is a poor mistress that demands more and more to feed the self satisfying addiction that props up their self esteem.
New Scientist has a psychological explanation for poor behavior online. Whilst the post talks mainly about email, NewScientist draws the relationship between this and comment trolls. You can read the whole post here, but here are some highlights:
Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms…the same thing happens with online communication such as email. Psychologically, we are “distant” from the person we’re talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we’re more prone to aggressive behavior, he says.
Another factor influencing online communication, according to Epley, is simply the risk of miscommunication involved with text-based messages, which are inherently more ambiguous. At the same time, he notes, email “has the feel of informality – we just fire something off”, even though we probably ought to treat it with the same care as a written letter. And, as most people probably know, this can cause problems for both the sender and the receiver.
I’ll leave the final word to New Scientist’s Michael Marshall:
I’m not sure what we can do to minimize miscommunication and abuse online. But being aware that we’re not as good at communication online as we’d like to think seems like a good start. I know I often have to restrain myself from joining in.
image credit: Wikimedia commons
Damn, it was a fun conspiracy while it lasted. Despite previous reports (our coverage here) Gizmodo is now quoting a German site Heise Online that claims that the iPhone doesn’t phone home.
According to Heise Online the iPhone doesn’t send an IMEI (the phone’s unique identifier) back to base but only application specific, but personally unaware data.
I’m not an expert on hidden data sending tools so I’m not even going to pretend to know which side to take, but certainly the original claims, that started at Hackintosh and was supported at other sites which came with some cool graphic evidence (below). More interesting still was the claims that hackers are now working on ways to tackle the issue: if they don’t exist, why are they working on it…or was it all a case of creative reporting? Who knows, I’ve still not been game enough to update my iPhone from 1.0.2.
The main lawsuit against Apple claiming that Steve Jobs and other Apple directors lied about backdating options has been dismissed.
According to the NY Times, Judge Jeremy D. Fogel of Federal District Court in San Jose said that the suit was dismissed on time grounds, in that it was based on statements over 3 years old, which presumably related to statute of limitations laws.
Apple argued that the case was invalid due to time limits, and that the statements predated 3 years.
The dismissal follows a similar dismissal in a related case in the so-called Apple options scandal by the same judge last week.
