Vertical Tabs

There were a few key reasons for my wanting to move from Firefox to Google Chrome but the ONLY, I repeat ONLY, reason I finally gave up on Firefox and moved to Google Chrome was because there was at least some form of vertical tab sidebar option in Chrome, albeit crippled compared to tree-style-tabs.

That is... until now.

Chrome updated and now there is no possibility for this tab sidebar.  And I for the life of me cannot understand why they are so fucking against having vertical sidebar tabs.

WHAT is the logical argument for it? WHAT?!  If you sill live in the 90s and only keep one or a couple tabs open at all times and just love going forward and back and reloading pages, then yes, having a few tabs at the top is more efficient.  But if you have a lot of tabs open it SAVES space to have a vertical tab bar.  Why? because tabs are wider than high, so you can fit more tabs in the space and have them be readable before you need to resort to scrolling.  On the top, you have to shorten the tabs to fit more in and have to use the scroll buttons sooner.  To top that off, most screens these days are wide-screen so it's just a better use of screen real-estate; most web-pages are NOT wide screen so there is unused space unless you love to zoom or have gigantic fonts.

I think that because tabs started out on top and are therefore the norm, they are just being lazy pricks and don't want to rock the boat or put in the extra effort on behalf of the mass of us that use a lot of tabs and therefore NEED this vertical tabs on the side.

Maybe they think that we shouldn't have many tabs open ever.  Or rather that we should go back to going forwards and backward ad nauseum.  There are many useful and valid reasons to have a lot of tabs open.  I'm not even talking 35 tabs of memory and resource gobbing youtube videos, I'm talking about normal use and even  for work.  Example.  I often have to look up python modules and it is helpful for me to have a bunch of the ones I'm using open in their own tabs and at my fingertips and NOT have to constantly go forward and backward and search and research and load and reload.  And when I'm doing a normal search I like to tab-open the links so I can compare pages and not have to back-button to the list of pages.

Come on!! WTF, man?

Browser woes

I've given it as much chance as I could stand for it to somehow correct itself but at the end of the day I have to say that Firefox has failed me.  FF has been my only main browser for what seems like as long as I can remember.  The primary reason was that it was cross platform and for the longest time I used Linux at work and Windows on the home machines, so I could use the same browser and setup on both.  But in recent years it has started to show its bloat.  Maybe it was the cool add-ons I loaded, maybe not.  One thing is for certain, it wasn't the speedy snappy browser of its youth.  That can be forgiven but lately it's been doing something aweful on my main PC.  It regularly and frequently just stalls there, whether I'm scrolling, moving the cursor, typing, anything, for several moments it would sit unresponsive, then catch up then do it again.  I've recently updated to 5.x then 6.x and the problem never went away despite there being lots of "fixes".  I have a habit of keeping a lot of tabs open and I've even gotten into the habit of paying special attention to close many AND to actually starting and restarting my browser in an attempt to free up resources.  I ended up putting up with that  for long enough, and the constant freezes were the last straw.

So lately I switched to using Chrome.  I had it installed some time back but never used it as a primary browser like I intend to now.  I gotta say, the snappiness and absence of stalls is refreshing.  In fact, VERY REFRESHING.  VERY!  I'm reminded of an article that I can't remember the details of but it concerned people getting used to having to reboot Windows to solve problems, and expecting software to basically suck... all because that's the only experience many people can have.  Can't really fault them for not having money to own multiple computers with different operating systems for comparison.  Even I don't feel like I have the time to, say, migrate to working on a Mac when what I have works (most of the time).

Anyhow, Chrome is good.  I'm going to keep using it for the time being. It's STILL missing a few things that I grew to depend on in FF, especially these add-ons:  Downthemall, DWhelper, and TreeStyleTabs (and to some extent Google Toolbar).  Nothing available for Chrome approaches the level of the FF versions.  If either of them get their act together (what I want available in Chrome, or FF fixing their performance fiasco, though hopefully both), then I will re-evaluate.  Until then, I'm going to be stuck doing most stuff in Chrome and certain things in Firefox.  A bit of a sad state of affairs.

Download Squad Fired!?

WTF?!  Did I miss something?  I have a lot of feeds in my RSS reader but this would have been one of the guaranteed survivors were I forced to trim it down to the essentials.  Aww man, that sucks.  And not much of an explanation to go along with it. There's a gaping void in my feed list now.  I valued it more than many of the other feeds they recommend as a replacement and that I even have on my feed list.

Addendum:  Ok, looking deeper through the comments followed by a search, it seems AOL-Huffington Post shut them down.  Again with the big media guys fracking up the good stuff.  shakes fist in air

BarTap for Firefox

Truth be told, one of the reasons I have recently gotten into the habit of suspending my laptops instead of shutting down completely is so that I don't have to suffer through reloading Firefox with the gazillion tabs I kept open but didn't want to close for one reason or other.

But finally this Firefox app just crossed my desk to solve that problem and I love it.  It has shot to the top 3 of must haves, maybe tied with Tree-style tab.  I agree with the comments to the app, it should have been included with Firefox by default.

Readme

I'd been a Bloglines user for some time now, but the only things I used it for were for the smaller things like friend's blogs and things that didn't have a huge update frequency on the scale of, say, Digg or even Slashdot or Boingboing. For the bigger stuff that I checked daily, I went to the actual pages in sequence and at most kept a recent articles listing on my personalized Google page. I tested out readers and aggregators that ran locally on my machine but determined pretty quickly that it didn't serve my purposes because there wasn't a convenient way to sync between my home machine(s) and workstation. So Bloglines sufficed but the interface was just clumsy enough that I only used it for a "here's what's updated" list.

Then a week or so ago I found that Google Reader aggregator was updated and I started using it. I'm a huge fan of Gmail, one of the few, if not only, web apps that I prefer to use online rather than with a local program. I gave it a go and, true to form, I like the interface. I've moved just about everything I monitor to it and even deleted the overlapped items on my personal Google page. The main usage difference (other than the interface) I noticed between this and Bloglines is that with Bloglines, I would just see what was updated and click over to the actual site to read the articles. Something about the look and the missing images just made me not like to read within it. On the Goolge Reader, I am just as happy to read the full text (when available) within the reader and only click over to the site when I want to look at the whole article or when I care about the comments. It's not perfect of course, but very well done and I have now changed my viewing habits.

Of course now that everything's in more or less a single stream, I'm starting to feel my own version of the Digg effect. Up to hundreds and hundreds of new and unread items waiting for me to click through them. I'm sure I'll find a system to not get too overloaded, the layout and interface seems to allow for it a lot better than other aggregators I've tried.

One aggregator to rule them all.

Labels at last

So it looks like I may keep using Blogger afterall. I kept telling myself, "come on, they're not that stupid, what's the holdup?". At long last, Google has finally stepped up to the plate and updated Blogger (now Beta.Blogger of course) and one such valuable upgrade is the addition of labels. For the longest time, I'd been confounded by the lack of any significant features added to Blogger, most notably, the lack of categories or tags. The lack of that feature really makes a blog inaccessable. I mean, if you stumble upon someone's blog and happen to dig an article and want to learn more on what they have to say on the subject via categories, then manyally sifting through the archives is a miserable option. Even site search is a poor substitute. Categories give topics an identity in a way that keyword search cannot (at least currently). Further, a listing of categories gives the entire blog a kind of identity and at the very least hints as to whether other articles on the site would be of interest.

It's not that I think anyone would be interested in this blog, but even for personal use, down the road, it would be nice to at least peruse the different things I had to write about a given interest at the time. There are still tons of cool features that area available to the likes of Wordpress and Typepad and others but for now, the simple category listing is a what I was looking for. I don't necessarily think they display or handle their "labels" elegantly at the moment but I'm happy it's there.

The synchronicity here is that I'd only last week started playing around with my own web servers and webdev stuff on my home Linux box. Some work projects had me playing around with web-works and through that I became more interested in the whole web-development thing. I finally got around to playing with Ruby on Rails and subsequently Typo after reading about them for the past year or so. So far, I think they're fantastic. I'd been imagining setting up something more focused and porting it to a hosted site and such, I have a few ideas in mind, but for now I'm content with the minor dribblings that I have here on Blogger. Perhaps someday after (or if) I develop more webdev chops I'll make a more serious attempt.

Loading please wait...

There are a couple of sites that I find I would probably use more, but dang they're slow. MySpace and Friendster are a couple of places that I have accounts. Once in a while the fit strikes me to do some people browsing, mostly through link following of friend's friends and such. Those fits get cut short frequently because the bloody pages are so polluted with cruft and busy with ads and markers and such that it gives me a headache. I think the data lookup is slow to begin with but when you top it off with all the flash and wierdness it grinds to a crawl. I applaud their popularity and am impressed with the whole social networking concept but I wish they had more elegant page designs, including layout and content, not just loading efficiency. Another offender in my book was Ain't It Cool News but at least they got rid of that infernal font-size system, where more popular stories were displayed in increasing font sizes. Was an eyesore.

That's something I grew to appreciate the likes of Google which since its inception has generally had minimalist and cleanly layed out pages. The simple and efficient text-only adds are also a breath of fresh air compared to the days when most pages had rows and rows of huge long banner adds and one had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to see the content, or worse, a link to the real content. But it seems to me that they also cared about speed. Their web-mail client is remarkable in not only its concept and user interface but sheer usability due to its speed. Until recently Yahoo mail was more of a burden to use for email, something I would only use in emergencies. I guess I've grown much more appreciative of the user viewing experience: elegant and attractive pages that load quickly.

Another page that I frequent but find frustrating is Lifehacker. It does have a simple and clean presentation. But for the life of me when it loads I get an eye-ache. I'm not sure if it's just my Firefox installations or not but it loads slow and with the few ads popping around the screen as things get filled in, and even afterwards. It's the page instability upon loading that is more the issue. They also keep relatively few posts on the same page and furthermore when you click next and previous links, a third of the posts or more are often the same posts as the original page, causing me to have to click next/prev more often and thus experiencing the loading page instability all the more. I hope someone there fixes that eventually, I do like that site a lot.

Yahoo, I just left but I may be back

I remember the days when Yahoo! was basically a public bookmark list by some clever fellows at Stanford. They'd come a long way quickly, even when portals were en vogue and everyone's least favorite uncle was creating their own portals, I still managed to stay fairly faithful to Yahoo. That of course changed in recent years, most recently with the rise of Google and the plethora of social networking sites. I'll be honest and say that in my opinion Yahoo remained kind of bloated and stagnant from a user experience point of view most of that time; though during a lot of that time they were still on top in my book, but more in the "lesser amongst the evils" kind of way. They've been on the prowl this year. Acquiring Flickr and now del.icio.us almost seems like an act of desparation. Something like "we need to be cool fast, let's buy the cool stuff and claim it as our own." I guess that's common and fortunately they're nowhere near as atrocious about it as... some other big monopolistic companies.

My take is that it took some serious ingenuity and competition to get them off their arses. That's a good thing. Whereas before they were not happy with their place but still didn't truly experiment and encourage imagination, now they see that that is the key: making stuff that's cool and works good. So I finally move my email over to their new beta email client and I have to say I'm impressed. It looks and works pretty much like what most email clients (e.g. Thunderbird) have evolved into, except through a web interface. I like it. Good for them. I hated having to page through my emails 26 at a time, and with abysmal threading and search features. They even upped their storage quota to 2Gig (direct response to Gmail) which was something I used to have to pay for. Actually I'm still annoyed that I still have to pay for POP3 access, spam filtering, etc... something that's free on at least one other free amazingly popular email service. If this had come along, oh, about half a year or a year ago, I would have been even more pleased. Sadly, it's just a liiiiiittle bit too late. I really dig the Googlemail interface. Yes it has bugs and all the features I want aren't there but I consider the basic label+conversation+search paradigm the wave of the future and the way I want to handle my email from now on. Sadly, their interface is also just a web interface and not the way my normal machine clients work so I'm kind of stuck doing things the old way with my work email and such. Ah well, maybe someday.

I'm glad to see Yahoo getting aggressive. Although I may not fully embrace their new direction, especially in the presense of some serious competition, it's still good for Joe Consumer.

Simp[l]y Delicious

I like using the social bookmarking system. It allows me to easily access boomarks from anywhere. More importantly it's a more powerful and flexible system than the bookmarks built into my browser because labels are more versatile than folders (Google knows this) and with most browsers you can only organize by folders. It also allows me to be more shameless about the number of things I can bookmark without becoming overburdened with organizing the links. It also lets me search through topics other people have marked with the same kinds of labels. There are other features related to this of course.

I started off with del.icio.us which is still the most popular. Then a number of other ones popped up. I started using simpy because it had some more features. Then I ended up coming back to del.icio.us, and for nearly the same reason people stuck with VHS over Betamax, Atari 2600 over Intellivision, and to some degree Microsoft over Apple. There are plenty of examples of sad cases where the superior bows to the popular. With del.icio.us however, it made more sense to favor the popular because it's a social web concept whereby the better service was the one with the most participants.