The Blog of G

This week is a bit of a deviation from the script as it were. I’m leaving the reviews for now and I’m gonna post about FireFox 2 RC 2 (that’s release candidate) so this isn’t the final release but very close. That’s a very strategic play by Mozilla as Microsoft are about to release IE 7 as a “Critical security update” and essentially force the IE 6 users to upgrade whether they like it or not.

Anyway back to FireFox 2, what’s new? well it’s not the tabbed browsing although they have added a “close” button to each tab which is a nice touch.

There is a new spell-check as I type feature which for some reason doesn’t seem to work on my laptop but does on my office desktop, even though it’s enabled on both. That could be due to the laptop though but I will come back to that later.

My personal favourite new feature though is the “recover my tabs” feature, essentially if the browser is stopped unexpectedly you can open all the same tabs the next time you start FireFox. It also means that if you just leave the browser open when you shutdown your machine, your given the option to open the exact same tabs when you reboot. so if your like me and open tabs as you see interesting links but don’t always get to read them they are there when I next open the browser. It’s also great if windows falls over.

The last thing I want to mention is how efficient the code this browser uses is. The reason I mention this is because of my newsed laptop. As some of you are aware I recently acquired a second-hand Sony Vaio 505 notebook, it’s about 8 years old and the is limited by a 333Mhz Celeron CPU and 128Mb of ram not a giga-anything in sight I have been using it as a web browser, newsreader and of course for blogging as it’s small and light and means I’m not hogging the Media centre if someone else wants to use it.

I had tried to load the original FireFox on this machine but found it unbearable slow even with only a single tab open, whereas I barely noticed a difference in performance with IE 6. I am typing this post on an 8 year old laptop in FireFox 2 with 5 tabs open and 3 of those are web 2.0 sites. Mozilla I don’t know how you’ve done it but I’m stunned with the performance I’m getting on my retro hardware

It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against IE 7 and even more interesting to see how long it takes for Mozilla to finalise this release candidate. Looks like the browser wars are most definitely back on.

Woot! My Sweetie got back from her business trip on saturday, finally. God I missed her, not just because she is the light in an otherwise bleak existence but also because she was carrying my “newsed” laptop home with her from the US, where it had been delivered to a friend of ours (Thanks Harold) after winning the ebay auction.
I am now the proud owner of a Sony Vaio PCG-N505VE possibly the most perfect laptop ever assembled! It’s small, compact, light, retro enough to have cred, while recent enough to do most of what I want and stylish enough to give even the mightiest of Apple fanboy’s Powerbook a run for its money and all this despite being a Sony product.

This isn’t my first post to be written on it, but it is the first to be published. The first post written should be available on friday as part of my new series of regular features, but more on that in another post.

There were a couple of things that “the old girl” needed, so a new battery is on order (first one to make a wise crack about Sony laptop batteries gets a slap ) until that’s delivered I’m tied to the wall socket, even though I did manage to pick up a wireless card for it, in of all places, Tesco. Boy was that a surprise a reasonable brand (Buffalo) for just a smidge under €40 while the local PC World’s most cost effective option was €70!

Now I could wax lyrical for days about the evil, profiteering of IT retailers but I never I’d see the day when a grocery chain would out do an IT retailer at their own game, tis a sad sad day for IT retailers everywhere…