The Rise and Fall of Netscape: A look back in history

Still remember those early days of the internet and the browser wars. Nice little flashback and educational for those who don't.

German Translation in the Brave Desktop Browser: A moan about localisation

Having a laptop with a German keyboard after almost three decades of using a UK keyboard brought home a few issues with software localisation and translations which are not as up to par as I thought. This simply came to attention because packages have this inherent behaviour of installing in that language if a particular locale or keyboard is detected, which is usually the wanted behaviour. I didn't notice it before because a British English interface was always fine and English in general is well supported in the IT world, with all its relatively small variations.

How to Hide Grip Handles in SeaMonkey 2.53

Seamonkey is one of those browsers I have used for what seems an eternity. It is of course more than a browser, probably the last surviving full internet suite with mail and news and feed reader included, an address book, Chatzilla for IRC and even a web site builder that was later outsourced and became standalone Kompozer, just as the browser component became Firefox and the mail and news component was developed into Thunderbird. With Lightning you even get a calendaring application thrown in, the whole office hog.

Today Google-Chrome Overtook Firefox

For anecdotal evidence, after Firefox staying above 42% for a long time and Chrome/ium in the 20s, over the recent two weeks this gap has narrowed and today for the first time Chrome is at 38% with 1135 page views and Firefox on 37% with 1094. Read into that what you will, this blog may not be representative.  It's a shame though, Firefox 22 has shaped up to a really nice browser with some great functionality added and memory leaks fixed. At the same time, Chrome belongs to Google and they may be spying on you every step of the way and passing it on. I'll be interested in Opera 15 when it comes out for Linux. Hope it isn't another Flock 'social' browser.

Building Chromium for Slackware64

Chromium, the browser, can sometimes seem a bit evasive on the Slackware64 platform. For a start, the binaries more commonly distributed are either deb or rpm files, and although Slackware with the 13.37 release has gone the extra mile to accomodate a new browser and added a build script for Google-Chrome under extra/ in the repositories, there is none for Chromium.

Bye-Bye, Firefox

It's been a long time coming. In October last year I wrote a post wondering what browser to switch to or whether to stick with Mozilla's Firefox. And that was even before the current madness, upping version numbers all the time with little if any perceivable benefit to the end user. The stability problems were easily overcome, just by re-enabling those little helpers called hosts file, Adblock and Noscript. It's a testimony though to how bug-ridden websites are that all those are needed just for a

What's the matter with Firefox these days?

Not long ago I was still defending Firefox as a good browser that never, or only very rarely like every few months, crashed on me. That may in retrospect have had something to do with hosts file and all sorts of nasties blockers, because once I disabled these for a while for a little test it suddenly kept crashing, like in abnormally exiting, at least once a day.

Iceweasel & Icecat - what's the difference?

Spurred on by looking at Kongoni GNU/Linux I found myself curious and decided to investigate what, if indeed there is any, the difference is between Iceweasel, which appears to have existed first, and IceCat, which until reviewing above distribution I'd never heard of. That's probably because I prefer to use the original software, or if I don't agree I use something completely different. I remember Debian which I was using in the day switching to Iceweasel because of branding and issues with patches, so what was the deal again? Enough people seem to stumble over this so hopefully we can clear up the confusion.