$('a[rel*=fancybox]').fancybox({
          'frameWidth' : 500,
          'frameHeight' : 465,
          'hideOnContentClick' : false,
          'centerOnScroll' : true,
     });

This is the fix:

     $('a[rel*=fancybox]').fancybox({
          'frameWidth' : 500,
          'frameHeight' : 465,
          'hideOnContentClick' : false,
          'centerOnScroll' : true
     });

See the difference? Yeah, neither did I. The difference is the last comma in the argument list.

That’s 3 consecutive major versions of IE that have been absolutely crap.  Why anyone continues to use IE is beyond me.  IE: sucking hard since version 5.

Enter Camino, which not only looks and feels like Mac, but tastes like it too by behaving like a real Mac app. Aqua widgets, proper alert boxes, a prefs panel that fits the theme. Camino is a fantastic browser and runs extremely well and is very stable. And today they release 1.5 – a pretty major milestone – and reveal their new website.

Congrats to the Camino team.

Nothing feels as perfect as Camino on my Mac, but it’s seriously lacking in the developer department. No javascript console, no web developer tools, no draggable tabs. Hopefully by 2.0 this will be ironed out.

If Apple ports Cocoa to Windows (like they obviously have done with at least a subset of Carbon in order to run Quicktime and iTunes), they can introduce all sorts of Mac software for Windows which could very keenly familiarize Windows users with the Mac experience to help lure potential switchers, people who might be close to considering a new computer and having to face a learning curve with Vista anyway.

In other words, this is great news. I’m firmly on Opera right now, but if Safari for Windows came out, you never know…

Click picture for a larger view

I’m not sure exactly what’s to blame for the specific problems I have: other programs on the computer? a single bad extension? I don’t know, but whatever it was, it was present in FF1.5, FF2, and Flock. And each had their own set of extensions installed. It’s not a core Gecko problem, because, as I showed before, Camino doesn’t have the same problem.

So, at the urging of Nate, who, I guess, also spends some time at his computer, I decided to go for a full time ride at Opera.

I don’t require THAT much from a computer: mainly, it has to be able to sustain my browser requirements. And those are tough, because I expect to be able to open 10-15 tabs and still have the browser function without (a) eating up greater than 200MB of RAM, (2) eating up > 10% of the CPU for more than a few seconds, and (third) locking up the browser or worse, the entire system. Enough use of Gmail, Flickr, or other AJAX apps and my Windows Gecko/XUL browsers toast themselves and everything around them. So I’m giving Opera a go.

The only crappy thing is that there’s no way to import form cookies, form history, cookie block list, ad-block filters, or history. And that sucks, because it’s going to take me a long time to rebuild that.

However – this is after a day’s work. Know what else slowly swallowed my RAM? Firefox.

Yes, Flock still doesn’t respect my xml-stylesheet in my RSS feed, which — along with the developers attitudes towards users requesting a “fix” – was the biggest turn-off and ultimately, the reason I left Firefox behind (and no longer recommend it to general users), but, like IE and Safari, it aims to be a *full featured* RSS reader and therefore, is forgivable. No one is asking for RSS readers to respect styles – just the ones that offer nothing but a subscribe button and, in the meantime, make the entire thing butt ugly.

So, I’ll be reporting back over the next few days on how my Flock conversion is going.

We are going to bring the XML/RSS easy-subscribe feature to a new, wider group who isn’t demanding it yet, with no planned course of action for the people who are currently using it and came to rely upon it. Furthermore, we will leave them with no official way to reproduce the behavior which has been present now in our brower for years.

In short, when the Mozilla team mankes a decison, it’s final, and it appears that they are looking to expand their userbase, even at the expense of the most dedicated users now. So if you choose to have the search engine of your website return RSS for external apps but styled XML for a browser, turns out — you can’t.

It’s been days since I posted on this site about this; the goal was to make sure my new post was not overly dramatic. But here goes: I am now going to be suggesting that Windows users I support use IE7.

Why? Because IE7 is a nice upgrade. It supports most of the features that I think are necessary in a browser. Most people will never use AdBlock or any extensions at all, so that who construct is a non-starter. And it’s much more secure. Firefox, however, has notable memory leaks. IE7 uses far less memory when open for a long period. This is a FIREFOX issue, as you can see, Camino doesn’t have the same problems:

Firefox, open for ~8 hours

Camino, open for ~38 hours

Lastly, the IE team has done an AMAZING job at responding to their users. I’ve watched the IE blog, and I am really impressed with the level of communication and immersion the devs have. They are patient and appear to take an interested in their users.

The Firefox team, while mostly even tempered and polite, has pretty much given me the push off by suggesting that they know better than I do about how RSS is used in the real world, and therefore, decided that my website should work the way that /they/ want. In fact, they are SO sure of themselves, they won’t even provide me — the webmaster — a way to do what I used to do, even with extra steps. No, consistency is key – my wishes are second to a consistent web experience for someone who is new to the web (and likely won’t even know the term “RSS” until about 2009). Furthermore, the leader of the project himself, Asa Dotzler, posted a “slam” against me in the Firefox newsgroup that perfectly illustrates the point – the developers are missing the idea completely.

They are so focused on catering to the end user that they have decided that that the tech-savvy people, people who made Firefox successful in the first place, are no longer important. So unimportant that when they complain that the browser has changed its behaviors and things no longer work as they have for years, their only responses are “we aim for consistency and ease of use for the end user.”

If Firefox devs can *decide* one day that the trends of use are different than current use or even different than intended when a standard was written, and will make decisions that change the ways the browser behaves with very little notice or upgrade path, how can we invest ourselves in them by using the browser full time? Knowing they could pull the rug out from under us?

To address those who say that IE7 does the same thing, I have two responses:

1. IE /adds/ functionality to RSS. It’s less insulting when I can do things manipulate the data I couldn’t do before. It’s not my preference, but it’s at least a decent response.
2. Much more importantly, IE7 *IS* an aggregator. It will save posts, mark them read, allow you to filter them, track multiple feeds, etc. IE7 is a full feature RSS reader, and a full featured RSS reader can remove style. Firefox just wants to style a feed its own way.

So, am I blowing off Firefox completely? I’m not sure. No doubt I am invested in FF, from both a data standpoint (all my cookies, usernames, passwords, etc) , but also from a user standpoint. I’ve been using it for over 5 years, and it’s home to me. But it certainly looks like the day of switching (probably to Opera) is coming soon.

Here’s the thread. I got a fairly nice response from one of the devs, and then two slightly shorter responses, including one that appears to do nothing more than suggest that since the way I style my feed sucks, it’s pointless to allow people to style threads.

One guy has a great point – if Firefox’s default style didn’t suck, would everyone be happier? Sheesh, hadn’t though about that, but you know what?? I admit, maybe I would be less upset.

I still think the browser behavior is bad, but if they’re going to intercept, at least do it with the same style Microsoft does with IE7.

I have to say, I’m fairly pleased with the Firefox guys’ responses. For a group that probably has to put up with plenty of people bitching about their bugs of choice, they have been pretty civil and well thought out in their responses.

As I’ve also detailed before, I have some problems with Firefox. In particular, a certain Firefox bug has pissed me off so much, not because of the bug, but rather, the fact that the Mozilla devs appear/appeared to be perfectly content with their decision, despite the arguments. I have blown off Firefox at home for the also-Gecko-based Camino. I am seriously considering blowing off Firefox at work for Opera.

But this is the real reason. It’s not just their XML arrogance. It’s this: Firefox is a mess when it comes to memory.

Click on the image for a full size view

Let’s break it down: Firefox allows developers to write extensions that utilize XUL, which means memory leaks could come from poorly written extensions. But as a user, my response is: I don’t care. If writing extensions can cause a WEB BROWSER to eat up over 1/2GB of memory, you’ve got a problem! Fix chrome! Fix XUL! Limit what the extensions can do! Otherwise, someone is going to release “Trusted Firefox,” or worse, offshoot Firefox to something simpler, something that is to Firefox what Firefox was to Seamonkey.

Camino, which doesn’t use XUL by the way, is much less featureful – sometimes annoyingly so, but guess what – it can runs for weeks without so much as a burp. This is Firefox after less than 24 hours with 6 tabs open, and the last 15 hours were of complete inactivity (overnight, while I was home).

I suspect this could be AJAX related (Gmail is always one tab). But since Firefox is my gateway to the web, it’s responsible for making sure the web plays nice through that window and correcting any behavior that makes it unhappy. And frankly, lately, it’s letting me down.

This is the bug, check it out and please vote for it.

Update: 17 minutes after I added my comment, the bug was re-opened. Thanks, Jake Olefsky!

But I am realist. The fact is, most large networks run Windows clients, and they ALL (save those few Windows 3.1x networks and the ancient, barely network-able Windows 95 clients) have IE on them. I’m willing to bet that a VERY VERY VERY small percentage have something older than IE5.5 on them, because browsing the web with IE pre-5.5 gives you such a reduced experience it’s just not feasible that a capable network admin wouldn’t have upgraded. These machines, today at least, are doomed to run IE6 until EOL. No newer core browser will run on them, and other browsers are just that – browsers. Since Win98, the browser is joined to the file manager, so they WILL run IE, even as a backend engine to hosts of products, from the help viewer to many management tools.

Now, ALL networks running Windows XP are running IE6 and, if genuine, are capable of running IE7 (after installing SP2). And everyone knows that IE6 is still a piece of crap. There are a LOT of reasons that IE7 is better than IE6. So, given that you have clients that are running IE6 anyway, why would you NOT want them running IE7? The vast majority of websites are 100% compatible with IE6, because I’ve read that unless you declare yourself XHTML strict, it reverts to the same quirks mode as IE6 anyway.

Those arguing that IE7 still sucks can piss off – it may, but that’s not the point. IE7 is still better than IE6, and I think it’s hard to argue otherwise. About the only worthwhile argument I’ve heard is “I’m waiting for it to mature,” which is valid if you’ve used Microsoft products. That said, I’ve been running it for over a month and I find IE7 to be much more stable and much easier to manage and use productive.

So – once again – not claiming IE is a godsend, just that it’s a very welcome improvement.

But I am realist. The fact is, most large networks run Windows clients, and they ALL (save those few Windows 3.1x networks and the ancient, barely network-able Windows 95 clients) have IE on them. I’m willing to bet that a VERY VERY VERY small percentage have something older than IE5.5 on them, because browsing the web with IE pre-5.5 gives you such a reduced experience it’s just not feasible that a capable network admin wouldn’t have upgraded. These machines, today at least, are doomed to run IE6 until EOL. No newer core browser will run on them, and other browsers are just that – browsers. Since Win98, the browser is joined to the file manager, so they WILL run IE, even as a backend engine to hosts of products, from the help viewer to many management tools.

Now, ALL networks running Windows XP are running IE6 and, if genuine, are capable of running IE7 (after installing SP2). And everyone knows that IE6 is still a piece of crap. There are a LOT of reasons that IE7 is better than IE6. So, given that you have clients that are running IE6 anyway, why would you NOT want them running IE7? The vast majority of websites are 100% compatible with IE6, because I’ve read that unless you declare yourself XHTML strict, it reverts to the same quirks mode as IE6 anyway.

Those arguing that IE7 still sucks can piss off – it may, but that’s not the point. IE7 is still better than IE6, and I think it’s hard to argue otherwise. About the only worthwhile argument I’ve heard is “I’m waiting for it to mature,” which is valid if you’ve used Microsoft products. That said, I’ve been running it for over a month and I find IE7 to be much more stable and much easier to manage and use productive.

So – once again – not claiming IE is a godsend, just that it’s a very welcome improvement.

Now, I’m still a bit ticked about RSS. For some reason, the Firefox devs feel as though RSS is meant to be handled by a reader, so they have Firefox COMPLETELY IGNORE the <?xml stylesheet?> declaration. I filed a bug report, and it was promptly closed with WONTFIX, although they suggest it might make for interesting discussion – I’m still pissed about it. Why do they get to completely ignore a standard? Microsoft would be GRILLED if they treated users this way (and they do – IE7 also ignores xml stylesheets.)

Anyway, I’ll end up using FF2 probably, but at home I blew off Firefox for Camino, and I’m seriously thinking about moving to Opera at work. In the meantime, my user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0