Ever since I updated the home computer to run the RTM version of Windows7 my gmail and greader experience has been very frustrating in Firefox. GReader just had no idea what data to display in the right hand side of the screen and gmail would just stick in the “please wait”, “loading” or “still working” status after sending an email (but would actually send the email).
Rebooting firefox into safe mode, or running ie8 worked fine so I knew it was not the computer but had to be an extension. Fortunately this was 100% reproducible so I was able to do some diagnostic tests.
I disabled all the likely culprits – flashblock, adblock,greasemonkey, better gmail, web developer, noscript but I still had the same problem. It wasn’t until I disabled the skype extension that the performance of google reader was back to normal and I could now send mail again. Seeing as though I only really use Skype to call my parents I don’t need the extension so it is now disabled. For some reason the uninstall button is disabled.
I did find a thread on the Google Help forums with the same solution which was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one with the problem and I came up with the same solution.
I upgraded over lunchtime this afternoon and so far it seems ok. There were several extensions that claim to not be compatible but I’ll be forcing the ignore version check using the Mr Tech Toolkit Extension. To disable the version check, click Tools/Mr Tech Toolkit Settings, select the Miscellaneous tab, XPI Install Options and then uncheck “Enable Addons Compatability checking” and optionally enable “Disable XPI install time delay” so you don’t get bugged by the delay each time you want to install an addon.
The plugins that didn’t work were Better flickr 0.3, better gmail 2.0.8.1, Better greader 0.6.1, bit.ly preview 1.262, firebug 1.3.3 (upgrade was found to 1.4.0.3b), Microsoft Net Framework Assistant 1.0 and New Tab King 1.9.7.
Both Bit.ly, and New Tab King seem to work – I’ve not tried the others yet as I now have to get back to work.
I subscribe to redmond mag and mcpmag but pages from these sites in google results (see top result here) are being flagged as possibly malicious and clicking through the “go ahead show me the site anyway” then leads to a blocked page (in firefox beta 5) at stopbadware.org stating that the site has been “reported bad”. Unfortunately there is no way to see *why* it’s reported as bad so I can’t make the decision myself and there is no continue button either. Instead my only other choice is to use internet explorer which is more likely to expose me to problems as there isn’t a flashblock/noscript plugin for ie like there is with firefox to provide basic protection straight away.
stopbadware.org sounds like a good idea but could actually expose someone to more dangerous content (and there really should be a “yes I know what I’m doing” button!)
Somehow I’ve managed to get firefox beta 2 installed on the parents in law computer. I’m not quite sure how it managed to get installed as I was on 1.5.0.6 with automatic updates turned on. As usual it was prompting me that a new version was available to download and then all of a sudden 2.0 was active! All of the extensions apart from tabmixplus were gone, but I’m not really sure how many were installed on this computer in the first place so it’s not that much of a problem. TabMixPlus was there, but disabled as it is incompatible with Firefox 2, probably because a lot of the functionality (but not all) has been duplicated into firefox2.
With ff2, the active tab is in bold with all the other tabs inactive – a great improvement over previous versions as it was often hard to tell which was the active tab when there were many (20+) open . However, it manages to do this by only opening up a certain number of tabs across the screen, any more tabs get added to a drop down list to the right of the screen which actually displays all of the tabs, not just the ones that don’t fit on the screen.
You can’t middle or right click on the drop down list to close the tabs though.
The other thing that is different is that using the mouse scroll wheel when hovering over the tab row scrolls the tab row, but the active tab does not change until you click on it – this is different to how tabmixplus behaves. I’m not quite sure which behaviour method I like – it would be nice to get a choice between the two.
One of the addons (they’re not labeled extensions anymore) that I will need to add is mouse gestures as I am so used to right-left clicking to go back and left-right clicking to go forward – I really miss that on pc’s/internet explorer that don’t have this option enabled or installed.
Microsummaries are a neat bookmark extension which means that if you bookmark a site that has a microsummary, the name field has a dropdown arrow next to it. By selecting the Live Titles information, the bookmark data will change as the web page is updated. Great for having a mini ticker like functionality, but not much use if you are used to using certain keys to navigate to a site in your bookmarks, or just trying to find the site (ie Absoblogginlutely! stands out a lot better than Firefox2 or Google Analytics or Event 1030) as it will no longer be called the same – see woot for a good example with the deal of the day where this would work.
Oh – spell checking is now available within the browser – this post has 11 “mistakes” in it – www is a spelling mistake apparently!
