dow.ngra.de

There is some merit in Firefox 3 after all!

Although two weeks late, I finally noticed that Mozilla Prism has been updated. Mozilla Prism is a “One Site Browser”, which is to say a browser started from your desktop tied to one particular web site. I have been using it since the first release, mainly to separate the Google Mail, Reader and Calendar windows from the rest of my browsing experience.

The new version is a significant reworking of Prism. First of all you no longer have to install a 6.6 Mb application in addition to Firefox. Now you can just download a 500 Kb Firefox extension, which will start Prism as a particular Firefox profile. And you can create the desktop shortcuts to your web site in one click using “Tools -> Convert Website to Application”.

Secondly Prism will finally pick up the favicons that the website is using and use it both as shortcut icon and (drumroll!) the application window icon! Before you had to download the icons manually and it still would use the Prism icon in the taskbar, which made it much harder to distinguish the windows. Having the GMail icon in the taskbar is just what I’ve been waiting for. Now, if only it would change on new mail…

However, no matter the changes, I’m still stuck with a major annoyance — no Firefox shortcuts work. And since half the sites on Internet do not optimize for 1680×1050, my first reaction in Firefox is often Ctrl+, to increase the font size. Well, hopefully they hit it in the next release, you hear that, Mozilla?

P.S. I’m making this post from my nifty dow.ngra.de admin browser app, now where do I find an icon for that?…

I’ve been running nightly trunks of Firefox 3 for more than a month now. The switch was not easy. The changes in the usability department seem small but some changes are 180 degrees.

While holding CTRL and wheeling the mouse the font size changes depending on the direction of the wheeling. Well, in Firefox 3 they inverted it. I’m not willing to relearn just because somebody thought the direction should be IE compliant. Change in about:config mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines to -1 and you have the old behaviour back.

You are reading pages with diagrams with small text? You resize the page and you cannot make anything out of the resized diagrams? Disable the image scaling, change browser.zoom.full to false.

You have old plugins that supposedly don’t work? Give them a try, install Nightly Tester Tools and tell them that they are compliant and see if they work.