Since switching to Linux I’ve had one issue that has really caused me grief over the past few weeks, and it’s been with Firebug, which to a web-developer is a pretty indispensable tool!

I compiled Firefox 2.0.0.11 using the ebuild from Gentoo Portage, and then installed the Firebug extension, but once Firefox had restarted to complete the installation, Firebug wouldn’t open at all. Whenever I tried to open it I received various error messages in Firefox’s error console including ‘permission denied to call method location.tostring’. Upgrading to Firefox 2.0.0.12, and Firebug 1.1.0b10 didn’t help.

After some digging I found a bug report that described exactly what’s happening to me. So I added ‘mozdevelop’ to my Portage USE flags, and then recompiled Firefox and now Firebug works a treat!

Tags: firebug, firefox, gentoo linux, Linux, portage

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Tags: firebug, firefox, gentoo linux, Linux, portage

I’ve been doing some internal testing at work this week using Safari, and I’ve moved our Mac Mini onto my desk rather than using VNC. I’ve been using some awesome software called Synergy which lets you share your keyboard and mouse over the network. So I currently have my main work PC (running Windows) which has dual-monitors, next to a third monitor which is hooked up to the Mac Mini. With synergy I can move my mouse cursor between all three monitors and work on either machine without having to switch keyboards, or use a KVM.

Obviously I can’t drag/drop files or move windows between machines, but it’s made life a lot easier for performing Mac testing. It even supports cut/copy/paste from one machine to the other. Here’s a picture of my desktop setup at work (click to see the Flickr version that has notes)

Tags: apple, mac, os x, synergy, work

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Tags: apple, mac, os x, synergy, work

Well Apple have released the public beta of Safari 3 for Windows, claiming it has “blazing performance” and an “elegant user interface”, judge the last point for yourself!

This is a screen shot of the default home page for Safari. There’s no text on the menus, or in the page, and the majority of the buttons haven’t loaded correctly either. I would include a link to this page so you could check it in other browsers, but the address bar doesn’t work, at all!

Apple say “Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.” which might be true, but I’d rather wait a few more seconds to have a page render correctly, especially if it means the Amazon home page doesn’t look like this

Here’s a summary of the issues I’ve experienced

1. Text not being displayed - This includes in menu items, pages, web-page buttons, address bar, search box
2. Buttons not being displayed - The back, forward and refresh are the only buttons that have any icons
3. No tool tips - Anywhere. This is especially annoying when buttons and menu items aren’t displayed
4. Broken address bar - This doesn’t work at all, you can’t see what page you’re currently viewing, or type anything into it, making the browser unusable
5. Random crashes - The browser keeps crashing for no reason at all

This is a shame, I’d love to have a fully functional version of Safari available on Windows, it would make development and testing a hell of a lot easier, but judging by the experiences of others I’d say it’s a little too early for this beta

Tags: apple, beta, browsers, safari, software, webdesign, windows

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Tags: apple, beta, browsers, safari, software, webdesign, windows

While digging around MSDN for some info I came across a bug that made me laugh…
BUG: Session ID Is Lost When You Close a Browser Window
Really?! It must be such a hard bug to reproduce…

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I’ve had few problems recently with Flash content rendering over the top of HTML elements, especially when using CSS based fly-out menus. This is quite annoying, especially after we’ve spent a lot of time developing a Flash intro movie for a client, only for them to ask if they can have drop-down menus on their home page too! So here’s the solution

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I came across an interesting article today (via Slashdot) entitled Optimizing Page Load Time written by Aaron Hopkins a Software Engineer for Google.

He’s put together quite an interesting study on how to improve the load time of a web page, using a variety of methods, covering everything from the obvious “Load fewer external objects”, to using HTTP Pipelining at the browser end.

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