new dad, loving husband, enjoys photography, technology, movies, etc.
{ Monthly Archives }
Metacritic is saying that GTA IV is well on its way to taking the all-time high score for Xbox360 and PS3. As of this writing, GTA IV has 11 scores of 100 and two scores of 98. IGN has a plethora of videos in case you’re interested. I recommend starting with the video review. I really think Iron Man will suffer its opening weekend because of GTA IV. I also think GTA IV will break every or nearly every video game record. Drool … I can’t wait!
I’ll comment more on Gruber’s latest update to his brief comparison of Firefox 3 and Safari 3. But for now, I’d like to address his original essay. This is really informal, so bare with me. The first part is my response to a few quotes. In the second part I list a few of the reasons I use Firefox more than Safari.
Firefox 3 still doesn’t support certain standard Mac text editing key bindings. For example, in a one-line text field, the Up and Down Arrow keys should move the insertion point to the beginning and end of the line, respectively. Drives me nuts.
Even worse in my opinion is the Home and End keys don’t work as expected in OS X.
Firefox doesn’t support the system-wide dictionary. In Safari (and most other apps), you can hover the mouse over any word and use Command-Control-D (by default) to display the definition of that word right there in the current window.
That’s actually really cool. I’ve never used that feature but it’s very cool. Usually I need a dictionary while using a web browser. In Firefox I’ve just gotten used to being able to very quickly type Cmd-T, “dict TheWord”, Enter and have dictionary.com’s definition. Firefox has had this feature for what seems like forever. (According to Wikipedia, Firefox has had the quicksearch feature since it’s inception as Phoenix 0.1, which I was in fact using in 2002).
Firefox 3 does let you drag to reorder tabs within a window, and dragtabs between windows, but it doesn’t let you drag a tab out of a window to create a new window with just that tab. Safari 3 does. Picky-picky, I know, but I use this feature in Safari every day to group related tabs together in their own window.
I’ve wanted this feature for a long time. Glad to see someone finally added it. You can drag a tab from one window to another in Firefox, but can’t drag it out into nothing and have it spawn a new window.
Auto-completion in Firefox requires the use of the Down Arrow key to select something from the list of suggestions. In Safari you can just use Return to accept the first suggestion. It might just be habit, but it feels to me like Safari’s auto-completion works a little better.
I can’t stand the way Safari does this. A good example of why this is bad is to consider the limited cases you’re typing part of an address you previously visited. In Safari, you’d have to add a space so Safari doesn’t auto-complete for you and take you somewhere you don’t
want to go. It’s another case of the computer thinking it’s smarter than you (or the programmer who added the feature thinking his code is smarter than the world - sarcasm-ish). In Firefox, I get what I typed. If I choose to use an auto complete suggestion, all I have to do is hit the down arrow.
Most of my reasons for preferring Safari to Firefox are Mac-specific details. Camino gets some of them right, but not all, and it’s missing the best thing about Firefox - the extensions.
Exactly the reason the Camino crew should just focus on making FF better for the Mac.
The main reasons I keep using Firefox despite some of the design benefits of Safari:
* Two button keyboard shortcuts to both location bar (Ctrl-L which Safari has) and search bar (Ctrl-K, Safari uses Cmd-Option-F which just feels wrong).
* Multiple search engines in the search bar (Besides Google, you can add tons of engines like Wikipedia, IMDb, Amazon, Yahoo, Weather, etc).
* Keyboard shortcuts for scrolling through the search engines in the search bar.
* Keyboard shortcuts for jumping to or through tabs (Ctrl-# and Ctrl-Page Down/Up respectively).
* Safari doesn’t to have the feature of loading the current tabs upon startup. That means I have to bookmark everything into a folder, then open that folder back up when I restart Safari. Then I have to delete the folder when I’m finished reading the sites in it.
* I use Firefox’s keyboard shortcut to Clear Private Data (what Safari calls Reset Safari). This is a nice performance feature.
* FF’s very handy Undo Close Tab feature is missing to Safari.
* Extensions rock!
* I don’t like that clicking Safari’s bookmarks button takes over your current Tab. I’m sure I could get used to it, but I don’t like it.
Cool Tron video.
It has a very modern, industrial, sterile feel to it (I hope I’m saying that right, which means I’m most likely not). But, the house is amazing. Just look for yourself.
Ars Technica has become on of my favorite tech sites to read. Here’s their coverage on Intel’s latest CPU, Nehalem.
Flickr finally added video to it’s site. What’s next, YouTube photos?