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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I obviously haven’t been keeping up with my blog subscriptions, because my good friend and colleague, Sean Johnson, has been busy updating his blog recently, with a new design, and some great book reviews and articles on Wordpress, CSS, HTML etc…

Head over to http://seanjohnson.net or pick up the RSS feed.

Tags: blogs, bluestone, bluestonecreative, designer, seanjohnson, webdesign

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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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The Bluestone Creative website has now been launched! Check it out at www.bluestonecreative.net

Tags: bluestone, bluestone-creative, peterborough, webdesign

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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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It looks like Microsoft have officially settled on the name for their new suite of creative web applications, called ‘Expression‘, and they seem to have Adobe in their sights.

One of the products (Expression Web) went on sale on Amazon.com on 4th December, but at the moment it’s only available to pre-order for $269.10, or if you’re lucky enough to have Frontpage, then you can upgrade for $89.96 (the best $89.96 you’ll ever spend if you ask me!).

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