YJL

I first knew Firefox's special release ESR (Extended Support Release) via an error during system update, which is intentionally for being used in mass deployment of organizations. A few days ago, Blogger dashboard display this message:

Your browser is no longer supported by Blogger. Some parts of Blogger will not work and you may experience problems.
If you are having problems, try Google Chrome. | Dismiss

Aside: I really don't like Google has been prompting Chrome more and more whenever it has a chance, though I can't really blame it since Chrome is its own product.


At first, I believed it's a mistake because I didn't think ESR was out-of-date. But after reading about ESR's proposal, I realized that the releases of ESR weren't what I thought. Originally, I thought their functionality somewhat matches normal releases, but they don't. Every point release (##.0.x) matches the version number of normal release, e.g. Firefox 15 for Firefox ESR 10.0.5, 16 for ESR 10.0.6. There has nothing to do with normal release except the release time. So, Firefox ESR 10.0.x is based on Firefox 10, that means Firefox ESR 10.0.x has only Firefox 10 functionality.

On Gentoo, the latest stable version of Firefox (both source and binary) is Firefox ESR 10, the unstable version is Firefox 13, which is the currently official stable version of Firefox.

If I want to get rid of that message, I can use Google Chrome (from official binary package) or I can upgrade to Firefox 13. But I don't use Chrome and don't like unstable packages.

The message is not annoying to me, just don't exactly know what functionality will not work properly. Since I haven't encountered any problems, I guess I will just live with that message for now.

Okay, I confess that I might have some tabby issue. I wrote Keep Last Two Tabs extension for Chrome to prevent accidental quit.

I think it has been a long time, I always have to manually create a tab beside the pinned tabs in Firefox. Somehow, I can feel comfortable without an unpinned tab. It has to be look like


There must be one unpinned tab! (Any good shrink? xD)

Actually, it makes sense since you don't want to change URL of pinned tab, that's why you pin it at first place, isn't it? As a Pentadactyl user, I can always your keybinding for new tab, so I will open URL in new tab directly.

But every time when I look at the tabs bar, it just doesn't feel right without an unpinned tab.

So, I added few code to my configuration of Pentadactyl. I need to implement in Firefox, not on top of Pentadactyl by using autocmd, which does not have tab removal event. However, you can check tabs with LocationChange, but that will have many unnecessary checks.

Note that closing animation will cause tab still remains for a short time after TabClose event is fired, but it can be checked as you can see in my code. The code also takes care when open tab just gets pinned by attaching to TabPinned, it will immediately create a new tab.

I think the code could be used directly in Vimperator as well.

I am glad Chromium is not my main browser, or I will also need to add new option to KLTT for similar thing.

I just updated to latest nightly build. At first, I noticed the loading indicator has gone and there is a loading progress bar above background tabs when they are loading pages, which is very nice and neat.


But then, I found out that feed icon in location bar is missing! It is discussed here and I honestly couldn't understand why do they develop backwards. (I didn't read the comments)

Do I have to get a RSS Subscription Extension (by Mozilla) addon as the one in Chrome?

Currently the fast way that I know of to look if there are feeds is to check Page Info dialog.

See the image by yourself:

I have Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 to show you how I don't like the select box in Chrome (4.0.275.0, Chromium) on Linux. You can see the dropdown box is shorter than text input and the button. It creates strange visual distraction, quite annoying. The others two browsers have same tall UI elements, I don't know what's wrong with Chrome.

The HTML code is:

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello HTML</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hello World!</p>
    <input type="text" value="Text Input"/>
    <input type="button" value="Click on me!"/>
    <select>
      <option>This is always shorter and I hate that!</option>
      <option>Option2</option>
    </select>
  </body>
</html>

I don't have any other WebKit-based browser installed, therefore I really don't know if this is Chrome's problem or Webkit's. I hope it will have same visual appearance in further releases. I couldn't find an issue on its list about, but I am also lazy to create one. So give me a link, I will star it.

It's still the same story...