Release notes can be found at Bug 451502. See the full article for the usual status matrix.

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When I wrote the last post, Google Chrome seemed like vaporware, but just as I hit publish, a release time was announced for later that day. Now that I’ve had a chance to have a play with the beta, here’s a brain dump of initial reactions:

• It’s fast and nimble. In a Camino way.
• It looks like a Fisher Price browser. Simplicity is good, but the style is very child-like, and it makes me worry about the OS X version* (Update: I think the Fisher-priceness is more of an XP issue, it looks much better on Vista). I thought the tab icons were nicely executed though:
  
• The location bar search is much better than I thought – giving solid URLs rather than just a ‘search Google for X’ option. For example, typing ‘Jeremy Ke’ brings up ‘Adactio.com’.
  
• It doesn’t look as if the ‘drawing layer’ in Chrome is quite up to scratch yet. It shows my naivety that I though such things were all part and parcel of Webkit, but it seems not. Text-shadow and border-radius in particular are broken.
• It does include the Webkit Web Inspector, so right-clicking reveals the familiar ‘Inspect Element’ command.
• I mentioned yesterday about the problem of multiple tabs, and lo, it was a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a beta, yadda, yadda.
• The ‘New Tab’ view is more useful than I thought it would be, with it’s inclusion of history and recently bookmarked and closed tabs.
• It does allow the use of other search engines, which is a good sign.

It’s a fairly promising start, but it feels more like a browser I would recommend to my parents than use myself. It also worries me using a Google browser, it feels like too many eggs in one basket. Or too many potentially prying eyes?

*Just found out that Mike Pinkerton, the Camino lead is working on the OS X version as we speak. I feel more hopeful about the OS X UI now.

Two things opened up for me today. First, I'm allowed to talk about my project at Google. Second, it once again involves working directly with the open source community, something I've really enjoyed over the last ten years with Mozilla. I'm talking about the public release of the Chromium project and Google Chrome. To be clear, this is my blog so I'm speaking solely for myself, not for Google. These are all my opinions, and mine alone.

Let's get down to brass tacks: How does this affect Camino? In the short term, it doesn't at all. Plans for Camino 2.0 based on the Gecko 1.9 are underway and unchanged. I have some super-reviews to do for smorgan tomorrow that'll get us closer to 2.0alpha status. There shouldn't be any talk of "doom" or "gloom" because really nothing has changed. People still download Camino and continue to send email to our feedback list saying how much they love the product this community has created. That's just as valid tomorrow as it was yesterday. Camino is a great product and it is appreciated. I'm not just saying that to make myself feel relevant, I want everyone in our community to know their efforts are noticed on a daily basis by real people.

I'm also looking forward to working with and becoming a part of the WebKit community, but more specifically getting jinglepants right back where he belongs. He knows where that is. It's interesting seeing how many people in the Mozilla community also participate in #webkit. I was worried for so long about what I'd say about all this and how it would be perceived and how I'd have to spin it and yadda yadda yadda, but I realized today that it's really just about building great software and being a part of a group of people who want to make the web better, faster, safer, and easier. To move the web forward. It doesn't matter if you're at Google, Apple, Mozilla, or even Microsoft. We're measured by our actions, not our words, so I wanted to make sure I used my experience to help move the needle. I think this new opportunity will allow me to do just that.

My goal (again, speaking for myself) is to build a first-rate, native Mac product for Chromium and make it so that other projects can stand on the shoulders of giants. That's what open source is all about. I don't know why I should be shy about saying that, and I don't feel bad about it one bit.

Stay tuned, I hope to have a lot more to talk about.

Google have just announced their new open-source browser Google Chrome, via the ingenious medium of a comic strip:

It’s good to see a new approach being used like this, particularly commissioned illustration.

First of all, the good news is they’re using Webkit. I remember John Allsopp joking about how great it would be if there was just one rendering engine, that was downloaded just like the Flash plugin. It’ll never happen, but the rapid adoption of Webkit outside Safari is getting to be the closest we’ll have to that. I had expected them to go with XUL and Gecko, in order to support other platforms with ease, so a voice at the back of head says this will be Windows only.

I can’t comment on all the talk about architecture/background processes, it all sounds very cool, but I have no idea if this really is a new approach or not. The main interface details are on page 19, where we see nothing new. Each of these features are currently available in other browsers:

• Tabs on top (or the ‘Omnibox’): Been in Opera for years, and more recently in Coda. While Safari doesn’t visually show tabs on top, if you have inquisitor installed it behaves in the same way as the Omnibox, in that each tab has it’s own URL bar and Search.
• Location bar that searches pages in the history: Another Opera innovation, recently added by Firefox. Also, for a few years now, Omniweb has enabled you to search the full text of pages in your browsing history
• New tabs show most used sites: Opera’s speed dial feature. Also, Camino has always had a dynamic ‘Top 10 most visited sites’ bookmark list, although I find that the 10 most visited sites, and the 10 sites I’d want to quickly access aren’t the same thing. I’d prefer to choose my sites manually.
• Privacy Browsing: Safari. Cough. Bless ‘em though, I like they way they use ‘buying a present in secret’ for the real world example.
• Pop Up Window Control: Most browsers have this, but in particular, the pop-up control sounds just like Omniweb.

They start by telling us how they’re rethinking the browser, and then go on to repeat what has happened before in others. I would’ve liked to see them approach another problem – namely ‘too many tabs open’. Beyond the performance issues, the more tabs you have open, the more difficult it becomes to know what you have open, and in which tab it is. Omniweb gets around this with it’s lovely visual tabs. Opera uses an alt-tab switch with thumbnail preview (which has also found it’s way into the latest Firefox nightlies).

The comic site itself highlights another web problem – loads of ‘next’ links, something Omniweb solves with a magical press of the enter key, and I’d love to see implemented in other browsers.

Knowing Google, ‘Chrome’ will most likely work really well, but not allow ads to be hidden, and of course, have the standard insipid google style. In fact just as I was writing this, a screenshot has appeared on news sites

I’m excited about the spread of Webkit, but at this stage Chrome doesn’t seem to offer me much. If they do make an OS X version, I’ll be duty-bound to try it of course!

Ever wonder what style Googlers use when they write C++ or Objective-C? Looking for a reasonable guide on which to base a new project? Well, we've recently open-sourced both guides. You can check them out at the google-styleguide project.

While I had nothing to do with the C++ guide, I had a lot to do with the Obj-C guide so I'm excited that it's finally open and usable as a reference for others. Note that we're already using it as part of Google Toolbox for Mac, an excellent repository of open-source utilities for any Cocoa developer.

Jo: I almost got into an accident this morning!
Me: ZOMG, what happened!?
Jo: Well, I was coming to the turn at Belmont Ridge and I thought I was going slow enough but I turned the wheel and I didn't turn. What's that called again?
Me: Hydroplane?
Jo: Oh, I was going to say "astroglide".

College football season kicked off last night. Whoo hooo! My class starts up again next Monday, as of this morning I've got 8 students. We'll see how many I can scare off by the end of the first lecture.

Here are the changes that are expected to show up in the release notes of Camino 1.6.4, scheduled for September.

• Usual set of latest changes, put atop of the document
• Changes to existing known issues (last part of the document) regarding new versions that fix issues
• New known issue to cover some of the myriad of problematic behaviors caused by 1passwd

The discussion on the document can be followed at Bug 451502

The most recent Camino release is version 1.6.3 (Universal Binary, for Intel, PowerPC, needs Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher).
Camino 1.6.3 multilingual contains: Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazillian), Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.
Camino 1.6.x users should receive notice of the new version by way of the internal software update engine. If you have not set up Camino to check automatically for new versions, use the "Check for updates..." item in the Application menu.

I love the Olympics, though maybe not as much as football. I can't wait for some of the more obscure sports, like handball and water polo. I already got to watch some handball on MSNBC, which was very cool. Is it wrong to be looking forward to badminton?

It'll be interesting to see how much is actually available online to watch. Note that you have to have an Intel Mac to be able to watch any of it; PPC users are left out in the cold. Booooo NBC and Microsoft! I want to watch the water polo tonight, but I'm not certain which events are available. It implies they will be, but we shall see.

I'm getting really confused by McCain's commercials in Virginia. First he blasts Obama because Obama objects to off-shore drilling. Then McCain claims that only he is the candidate for renewable energy. Huh? Which is it? It's also frustrating listening to my conservative friends talk about how Obama's reference to "change" means a nationwide spiral into Communism, because "there was once this person who brought 'change' to Cuba". Yes, that's right, comrades. Where's that toilet paper line again? Seriously, people believe this shit.

My new remote control has a scroll wheel, which this week I finally got working. You can program it with a javascript-like language to do just about anything you want. I actually had it working a few weeks ago, I just had an old version of the firmware w/out onRotary() support on the device itself. Sigh. Who's the l33t hAX0r now, eh?

Football football football! Tonight! I hate pre-season, it's such a waste, but it's football!

I have to buy a new mattress. Ugh, talk about hell. All brands suck and fall apart and have terrible reviews. Hell, I tell you.

Ye gads, Dell have shocked the pants off me with this tasty piece of industrial design! The diminutive Dell Hybrid PC comes with optional coloured sleeves, but in particular I rather love the bamboo sleeve version:

This kind of thing adds warmth and organic feel into something where normally only cold industrial aluminium or cheap black & grey plastic was before. Granted, there may well be cheap plastic in there, but this is a Dell that I would be proud to have on my desk. The specs also show it would make a good TV media centre – if only I could install OS X on it! More details on the Hybrid here

Maybe I’ll buy a bloody Dell after all.

Delia Derbyshire has long been considered ahead of her time. One of the earliest creators of electronic music, she is most famous for her work with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale, at which she created the haunting original Dr Who theme, in an age without synthesizers:

A lot of modern musicians like Orbital, Stereolab and Spacemen 3 cite her work as an influence, and it’s easy to to see why.

What sparked this blog post was the news that more of her work has been discovered, some 267 tapes to be exact! All of this is going to be digitized and made available, but in particular was this experimental dance track that she created in the 60’s. Made decades before ‘electronic dance music’ really happened, and yet it sounds like something created today.

This clip from a BBC Four documentary gives some insight into how she created music with reel to reel tapes:

Sadly she died in 2001 at 64, just after rediscovering her love of electronic music, working with Peter Kember (Spacemen 3, Sonic Boom), of which she said:

“Working with people like Sonic Boom on pure electronic music has re-invigorated me. He is from a later generation but has always had an affinity with the music of the 60s. Now without the constraints of doing ‘applied music’, my mind can fly free and pick-up where I left off.”

Discover more about her life at delia-derbyshire.org

When a concert says "rain or shine", they mean it. That's exactly what happened to us at Meriweather Post on Sunday night, when a long line of thunderstorms moved through during the concert and soaked those of us cheapskates on the lawn. Thankfully we stopped at the mall right beforehand and picked up umbrellas, but we were still wet by the time we left. It rained pretty much from the minute we sat down until the minute we drove off. At least John Mayer seemed moved by our plight, but not enough to let all of us backstage.

The concert was pretty fun regardless, though I still have no clue who the opening act was. Some guy that looked like a girl. We couldn't really hear them or see them (everyone was huddled under umbrellas). Things opened up a bit when JM came on as everyone stood and most of the umbrellas came down (not the ones in front of me, however, so I couldn't see except for the screens). He's a great guitar player and worth seeing live if you ever get the chance. I may have to go buy his last couple of live albums.

Walking out in the darkness and mudslides at intermission, i almost wished for an iFlashlight on my phone. I said almost. I'm lying.

I’m big fan of the French artist/illustrator Geneviève Gauckler, having discovered her work via the Guardian Angel Room project.

Now, I’m not sure why, but I was really surprised to see her work (or at least her style) in the backgrounds of CBBC, the site for BBC’s youth output.

I’ve tried to do a bit of searching, but no information is forthcoming, and I can’t see a credit anywhere. I’m surprised, can anyone tell me if these really are her work?

There’s also wallpapers available too:

Things have been really hectic of late with Jo and Alaina moving in this month, so I haven't had much time to blog. My life has become very different, now suddenly being a full-time parent and my house is a lot smaller. Not in a bad way, just different and new. At least I'm drinking less, that's probably good, though the reverse of what I would have normally expected.

I was one of the foolish who downloaded the iPhone 2.0 image, but thankfully for me it didn't apply (I even tried twice, what was I thinking!?). I gave the other foolish mortals a day to let iTunes activation shake out (tvl?) and tried on Saturday where it went through without a hitch. I miss the days of iPods with Firewire, restoring 8gb of media takes like a half an hour! We're still holding off doing Jo's phone, but will probably do it once she builds her music collection back up on her Mac. You think I'd let a PeeCee in this house!?

Along those lines, I'm having to rely on my router (a linksys that's destined for the landfill, I hate this POS) for parental controls since the iMac in A's room isn't souped-up enough to run Leopard. I'd like to swap it for a TimeCapsule, but I can't find anything (anything!) on Apple's website that talks about its parental control functionality. Yes, I get it, it can do backups. Anything else!? If Apple is assuming that everyone can (and will) run Leopard, that's t3h suck. Tiger runs just fine on this little iMac, why should I be forced to upgrade?

The app store is fun and kinda cool, it's nice getting to run what I want, though I think I'm still one of the few who is more than happy to cede all control to Apple to ensure that my phone doesn't flake out or brick because of some rogue app. I do have some issues with them controlling what can and can't go on the store due to fears about competition (c'mon Apple, just don't be evil!), but as an end-user, my sanity thanks them. I don't think I need 3 flashlights, 10 tip calculators, or 8 todo apps, though. My currency converter is better than yours!

What I really want is a way to easily blog from the phone, but maybe that's asking too much. What I've found is that my main obstacle to doing things on my phone is that nothing remembers passwords. So if I want to make a note in FaceBook or sign into my blog, I have to re-log in, and that's a serious pain. Yes, I'm lazy. There, I said it.

I've also taken on a new role at work, leaving the Desktop team for something more exciting. After almost three years on the same team, it was time, but doing so simultaneously with Jo moving in certainly adds to my stress. I can't talk about the project, but you'll find out eventually. Or you won't and I'll go back to drinking.

Going to see John Mayer tonight, should be fun, though any long car ride with a tween is an adventure. No, damnit, we're not there yet.

Gawd Bless™ Chris MIlls and Gawd Bless™ Opera, for together with authors like Norm they have begat the Opera Web Standards Curriculum.

I linked to this in my sidenotes a couple of days ago, but really felt it deserved a bit more attention, considering the extraordinary amount of work that has gone into it.

Opera’s new Web Standards Curriculum, released in association with the Yahoo! Developer Network, is a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics. It already has support from many organizations (including Yahoo! and the Web Standards Project) and universities. The first 23 articles are currently available, with about 30 more to be published between now and late September.

Finally, there is non-reference resource to point people to, where they can actually learn in stages what web standards mean, and how to adopt and use them to build a better web. Heartily slapped backs to all of the contributors!

This is for those who watched (and care about!) Dr Who episode 12 The Stolen Earth, so be warned – there are spoilers!

This email landed this morning:

“I’m surprised to not see a Dr Who post on your blog. Are we going to get one? Will David Tennant be staying? Did you feel a pang of sadness at the thought of losing our current doctor?”

Ah, go on then.

I don’t think this is when David Tennant leaves, and I base that solely on the fact that he’s been seen filming the Christmas Episode! However, some points against that though:

• It’s possible that the production team kept his leaving secret – after all they had planned that Rose would be coming back, and managed to keep it secret for a couple of years.
• Catherine Tate did put her foot in it by saying this was his last season, after which there was an air of ‘she let the cat out of the bag’
• The scenes for the Christmas episode may be flashbacks, or some other ‘Time-Crash’ style plot device. Or even a complete Red Herring.
• Ood Sigma telling him that his “song may soon end” (although I take this to refer to Professor River Song – too literal?)

Still, my feeling is that next year’s special episodes will be his last. 3-4 years is the usual reign for a Doctor, and I’m sure that he would want to move on soon. He’s a great actor after all, and wouldn’t want to be typecast no matter how much of a fan he is. I hope he doesn’t go though – he makes even a bad script magic to watch.

So if this isn’t his last story, as I’m reckoning, then that leaves some issues. Will they back out and do some cringey plot device about how he regenerated but ‘came back the same’? Hopefully not, but here’s my theory: There was a brief mention to Donna that she ‘had something on her back’ – referencing the previous episode (Apparently Dextrus says this to Donna in ‘Fires of Pompeii’, but I missed that reference). There is still a Time Beetle™ on her back, and once some other choice is reversed, it will undo all these events. Anyway, we’ll see come Saturday!

On Saturday 9th August, I’m going home! Leamington Spa is where I was born and spent 22 (in total) years of my life, and I’m going back to talk at this years Geek in the Park organised by the Multipack. There’ll be a picnic in the picturesque Jephson Gardens, followed by an evening at KoKos.

I’ll be talking on “Pixel Pushing: An introduction to Icon Design”, which will go over the theory and practice of creating icons for desktop applications and websites.

Drew will be tapping in to the nostalgia vein again, with ‘What Brian Cant Never Taught You About Metadata’. I hereby give him the challenge of working Jamie and the Magic Torch into his next talk.

I’m praying for good weather, and looking forward to meeting other geeky picnicers!

Once people got wind that I’d been trying out Expression Engine, I’ve been badgered with the question “Which one should I use: Textpattern or Expression Engine?”. This post is to try and answer that, but be warned it’s going to be a long one!

When choosing a CMS for a site, I would say that there are 2 main factors in the choice:

• What you want to use it for
• Personal feel

The latter can’t be argued. It’s a tool, and what feels right to me, won’t necessarily feel right for someone else, and this a very important point. The former is a bit more tangible however.

Just as I like to try out every browser to make sure I’m not missing anything, I feel the need to dabble in as many CMS’s as I can. I’ve flirted with Wordpress (loved the theme system, hated the template tags use of raw PHP), Pivot, MovableType (used on the first version of Hicksdesign), Sympony (burnt my fingers on the paid pre 1.0 beta), Tumblr and EE. I feel I should mention Chyrp here too, as I recently tried and loved it – logical layout, nimble and simple without being too simple.

However, each time, I come back to Textpattern.

My last date with EE was 2 years ago. I spent a few days getting used to it, and got into the idea of template groups and found it a really flexible CMS. However it didn’t offer me enough over Textpattern to make it feel worth the effort of converting my site over. Without a real life project to use it on, that EE knowledge faded away. In the meantime, every other designer on the planet has raved about EE. So much so that it was a bit of a turn off ;o)

Recently, I decided I needed to try EE again, so instead of replicating my site, where I couldn’t see any advantages, I picked on my wife Leigh’s site Hicksmade. So, after a week of re-acquainting myself with it, I can now see why EE is raved about so much, and where it would be useful. I was helped along by Ryan Irelan’s excellent EE Screencasts (very highly recommended!) and EE buddies Simon Clayson and Brian Warren.

Excuse the bullet list, but here is where EE shines:

• The key thing about EE to me is more fine grain control over everything (with some exceptions!), right down to whether a page is cached or what fields are available when posting to certain weblogs. Everything can be tweaked to your personal preference. This level of control isn’t necessary all the time however, so that would be the first deciding factor in EE over TXP.
• Members and member management is other main feature that would make me decide to use EE over TXP. I can think of 2 sites I’d created in TXP that would’ve benefited from this.
• Custom Fields madness! Textpattern has a great plugin to provide similar functionality, but the level of control and ability to associate the fields with a certain section is great, and of course, built in.
• It’s the same with categories. The rss_unlimited_categories plugin for TXP provides a lot of what EE does by default but not all. Categories are a weak area in TXP, only allowing a maximum of 2, without clean URLs.
• The Multiple Site Manager is genius. Again, something that can kind of be replicated with a TXP plugin, but it feels like a hack in comparison.
• You can edit the templates in a text editor, rather than via control panel. Lovely! (You still have to create the template in EE first, but hey.)

All good so far! But wait! Here come the rants!

• My biggest beef with EE is the admin panel. I find it needlessly complicated, with options hidden behind many overly-wordy, illogical links and dropdowns. While a certain amount of this is inevitable with the level of control that it offers, it’s certainly more painful than it needs to be. The longer I have to look at it, the angrier I get!
• EE promotes itself as a CMS, rather than blogging tool, yet out of the box it insists on referring to ‘weblogs’. This can be changed through one of many preferences to something more logical like ‘section’, but the template tags will still refer to weblogs. Harumph.
• /index.php/ shouldn’t be in URLs by default, and it’s right pain to get rid of (but you can do it). Likewise, getting simple /section/title/ urls requires a lot of work. For something so flexible, getting the URLs I want is painful. With a new site this isn’t so bad, you can put up with the extra URL segment, but when converting a site from TXP, and not wanting to write large .htaccess redirections, it’s vital.
• EE seems obsessed with statistics, time taken to render page etc. It’s all superflous fluff. Generally, I’m left with the feeling of “I wish I could just get rid of this bit here…”
• A smaller rant, I’m none too keen on the tags: some require exp: at the start, some don’t.
• File management is behind Textpattern, which has more control over uploaded images and files. This really surprised me! There is a good file manager plugin for EE, but this review is looking at built-in functionality.

The upshot is, that for a lot of client sites, EE is wonderful (if you can put up with the admin side) – especially sites that need members, forums and all that jazz. The thing is, if a site doesn’t need those things, it’s less pain and more pleasure to use TXP.

I keep coming back to TXP because:

• I love the control panel. Clients love the control panel. When you first log in – it takes you to the write tab. It assumes the first thing you want to do is add content, not look at a dashboard with a load of statistics. It may not be the most aesthetically pleasing, but it’s clear and laid out logically – Content, Presentation and Admin. It’s clear where you need to go to add new content, change layout and edit preferences
• I love Textpattern’s XML style tag system. For someone like me who writes in HTML, it clicks instantly, and has a consistent structure that aids recollection.
• TXP’s file management and automagic thumbnail creation/relation with it’s parent image
• In general, I feel I can do a lot with Textpattern, and quickly.

So, in summary, I like both, and which one I use will depend on the job in hand. EE v2 will bring with it a redesigned admin panel, and seeing as that is my biggest complaint, I’m keen to see if it improves the situation. The wee preview that was given at SXSW looked a bit ‘created last minute’, but even that looked hopeful.

What a week it’s been for a browser whore – 2 major updates to trial! Opera brought out 9.5 last week (in a move that felt a bit “We must beat Firefox!”), and Mozilla delivered FF 3 this week after some false contractions. What follows isn’t meant to be a proper review, just a brain dump of impressions from living with each one for a few days. Neither have I ‘plumped’ for one browser – I continue to use them all!

Mac Native Themes

Both of these browsers are in the same difficult position – trying to keep a ‘family’ style across platforms while also being a good desktop citizen. My position on that is that looking and acting like a native app is far more important than keeping it in the family, but I guess if you use the same browser on dual platforms, it helps consistency.

Both of these new browsers have much improved Mac themes, that still don’t quite hit the mark. Firefox has managed to get a unified toolbar at last, but still needs an Arronax theme to finish it off. I’ve not found anyone yet who thinks the bloated back button is a good idea (yes I do know you can turn it off with ‘use small icons’) – it also looks more like a slider rather than a button:

That’s the default, and here it is with GrApple Graphite applied:

See how it adds nice little mac touches like the header for the sidebar, at the same height as the tabs? Lovely! However, beyond the browser theme, Josh Aas has done incredible work in connecting to Cocoa API’s, resulting in elements like proper, rounded semi-transparent menus and progress thermometers. FF no longer feels like the homely Java app that it once felt like on OS X!

Opera’s new mac theme is a vast improvement too, although to be honest, any change to the previous theme would be an improvement. I’d refused to use Opera for anything other than testing sites because of it. When the alpha for 9.5 was released, it didn’t look much better, but a week before the final release, it finally started shaping up.

However, it still falls short. For example all the toolbar buttons are grey except for the stop/reload and home:

It doesn’t feel as good as the ‘native’ Opera skin, which is lighter and crisper, and to me, feels more mac-like. The dark tabs have caused some controversy, but I quite like it in this configuration:

This is something I like about Opera – being able to have the toolbar underneath the tab – don’t ask me why though. Form widgets and scrollbars aside, I prefer to use the native theme in Opera.

Neither browser has an updated icon (a new FF icon is awaiting approval!), but Opera in particular really needs to. The shadow is the first thing that strikes you as being wrong, not just the lack of transparency, but the fact that it has highlights in it! I really fancy having a go at updating the Opera icon.

Rendering

First of all, Opera really wins on speed, hands down. It renders fast, and the interface is nimble. Speed is a very subjective thing, and is governed by all sorts of different factors, so this is just my experience. Firefox on the other hand still has some of the sluggish interface feel from v1 & 2- when switching tabs or resizing the window. Opera joins Camino and Omniweb as being the fastest browsers I have, but overall, I reckon Opera has the edge. It also has lots of new CSS goodness, including text-shadow (yay! can has etched text!) and @media queries.

Firefox has still to implement selectors like text-shadow, but rendering is much improved nonetheless. The move to Cairo has brought with it decent crisp type at last, with support for kerning and ligatures (even if they don’t always happen where they should).

Other Features

• FF now has growl support! Something Opera would benefit from, as their ‘toast’ style notifications are decidedly un-mac.
• The new FF location bar menu is great, and I think the new of quickly adding a bookmark (click the star to add, and deal with filing it away later)
• I don’t think it’s new to 9.5, but I like Opera’s content blocking system. When turned on you can click the areas you want to block (which feels like a shooting game!).
• Opera does thumbnail previews of tabs when you hover over them. I’d love them to provide this as a sidebar option like Omniweb.

Cons

Downsides to Opera? I miss being able to correct spelling on a single word. I keep looking for a history menu at the top that isn’t there. I miss a preference to open new tabs in the background when cmd-clicking (you can hold down shift to do this, but I want a preference!). I’d also feel more inclined to make use of the mail client and RSS reader if they weren’t just basic unstyled views. It still feels like you still have to put in some work to get the chrome layout looking as you want it, but to be honest these are fairly small nitpicks. Opera is now a browser that I would want to use everyday.

Downsides to Firefox? Well, first of all, I really hate the way it adds ‘- Mozilla Firefox’ to the window title (can that be turned off?), I just want it to butt out! Update – this seems to be a inconsistent bug rather than an intended feature!

I would’ve liked a little more movement on the CSS side and Acid 3. Again, these are small complaints rather than major ones, and like Opera, it’s become a browser I would want to use!

Summary

Out of the two – Firefox has most mac native look and feel (once Arronax has polished things up a bit) while Opera has better performance. Both are great, and the world is better off with them both of them around. Not sure that I’m better off though – for me the choice of browser is harder than ever.

Newport in 1875 was a hotbed of crime, as documented here regarding the theft of a LARGE CUCUMBER from Mrs Holland’s garden:

Here’s an album that feels like it’s release is timed to perfection. Fleet Foxes really suit the unusually summery weather we’re having in the UK. For an idea of the sound, I’d start with Band of Horses, and make it mellower and folkier, and well, a little more baroque. White Winter Hymnal is an ideal introduction, but don’t stop there, because the self-titled album is a blinder. A definite contender for favourite record this year, but then again, I’m always a sucker for harmonies.

Download Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal. There’s also a session on Daytrotter for further free enjoyment.