My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has said that an internal build of IE 8 now passes the Acid Test. Wow! Thats an achievement. I think its the second browser after Opera to pass the test. While IE 8 is expected to be released in an year or so, Firefox 3 is close to release. Its already in Beta 2 and it rocks!

Its based on Gecko 1.9, pages now loads really fast, UI is cool, Proto theme blends well with Mac and so on. If you ask for my favourite feature, it is the auto complete feature in the location bar. No longer you have to type from the beginning. Type any character in the URL/page name you want, Firefox shows all the results. See the screen shot:

In another related news, Mozilla Prism isn’t exciting as I thought earlier. Its just creates a short cut and nothing else. I thought some nice integration such as Application Menus are on the way, but nothing of that sort. If all I want is a short cut on the desktop, I don’t need an application, all I need is the upcoming version of Google Gears!

written by Prakash G.R.

Disclaimer: Even on my MacBook I use Firefox rather than Safari because of the wonderful plugins that I need.

I’m using Safari on Windows since the day its announced (and switched back to Firefox today). There are some nice things about Safari (like Find) but I don’t like the product as a whole. Here are top 5 reasons why Safari is not going to succeed:

5) Safari installs unwanted apps: The installer of Safari tries to install other unwanted software. (No. I definitely don’t want Bonjour)

4) Safari doesn’t import your settings from IE/Firefox: When I install Firefox, I remember Firefox giving me options to import my settings from IE. So that I don’t have to loose any bookmarks. Safari doesn’t do that. So I’ve to recreate all the bookmarks

3) Safari is NOT a fast browser: I don’t know about the benchmark results. But the applications I use like Gmail, Google Reader takes more time to load than Firefox/IE. Googling around I found the real reason. More over, its neither a sleek browser. Even for the modest number of websites, the memory usage shoots up.

2) Safari is not a native Windows application: At least it doesn’t looks/behaves like one. For example, its Edit > Preferences not Tools > Options, you can resize only from bottom right corner, …

1) Safari’s font rendering is pathetic: Perhaps besides the other reasons like Security/websites compatibility, if there is a single big reason a user is going to dump Safari on Windows, it could the font rendering. There are reasons why Apple selected this rendering. Honestly I don’t give a shit about that. To me it should be easily readable in my screen and its not so.

I was wondering why the hell did Apple enters a game which it can’t win? The reason is simple. Steve decided to close iPhone to third party applications and the only way to write apps is Web 2.0 and Safari is the only browser in iPhone. No Firefox/IE/Opera. So why should a developer write web apps for a browser that has a single digit market share? The only way to increase the market share is to let Safari go out of Mac and explore the windows arena. Is it going to work? Who knows? It might!!! Look at what people said when iPod was released.

Related Links:
Safari for Windows announced
Gmail extension for Firefox
Top 10 Firefox extensions I use

written by Prakash G.R.

Now that I own a Mac, I’ve to kick M$ and M$ products and praise Apple’s product. At least thats I’ve seen with every switcher. On the contrary, I’m now praising a M$ product - Photosynth. Its really cool and nice one. It analyzes a set of photos and presents you a 3D view of it. Its really wonderful idea and an amazing implementation as well. More over its not a desktop product like Picasa, rather its on the net. Check this out for yourself: http://labs.live.com/photosynth

written by Prakash G.R.