Don't Back Down

According to at least one source (via), the Windows Genuine Advantage program now supports Mozilla browsers (including Firefox) through the use of a downloadable plugin. Sweet!

Version 1.6.0 of the Bloglines Toolkit is now available for download. The toolkit currently supports 8 languages out-of-the-box (contact me if you want to add more) and has been configured to be compatible with the 1.5 beta version of Firefox. Those of you with automatic update checking should be getting an update notice in the near future. Enjoy.

Those of you who have used Firefox for a while have undoubtedly encountered a problem with certain types of popups getting past the generally outstanding popup blocker in the software. It is puported that these may be caused by Flash - and this tip alleges to fix the problem through the use of privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins. I went back to PopupTest, and it seems that I'm still vulnerable to the Drop Down Popup, so it looks like the search continues.

Allegedly, the most excellent Greasemonkey extension is insecure, allowing folks to read files from your local hard drive. I tried Mark's leakage demo, only to find, well, nothing. I didn't get diddly. This may mean that it only works with particular versions (I'm using 0.3.3), it may mean that the code is no longer "active", so that it doesn't work, or it might mean that in some cases it's not actually a problem. I don't know the answer - but you should be aware, nonetheless.

After thinking about this momentarily, I came to the realization of why it wasn't happening for me. I have only two scripts installed at this point - Gmap Extras and UPS Track. Both of these scripts are set to work for only particular sites. Because of this, when I try Mark's page, Greasemonkey doesn't run - it doesn't think it needs to, since that's not one of the sites listed in the configuration. Adding it, or worse, adding "*", allows it to work just fine.

While I can't say that this makes Greasemonkey secure, it does make me feel a bit better. Of course, the sites that are listed may not be malicious now, they could become so with the current owners, or they could be taken over by someone who is. Still, it makes me feel a bit better that I'm open only to two sites - not to every site on the planet. And some of the more useful scripts, I'm sure, are open to every site you visit. It would appear that those are indeed dangerous.

Finally, it may be that I am vulnerable and it is simply that this site doesn't exploit that sort of vulerability. So if you're concerned about such vulnerabilities, you may indeed want to make the monkey frown, or perhaps banish him altogether. But it would appear that being completely vulnerable to every site in the world could be a bit of an exaggeration.

As I was doing my fiddling today, I think I overloaded Firefox. It had 48 tabs on-screen, and there were others that I couldn't see. Using CTRL-TAB to switch between them became impossible. Even viewing them (while selected) didn't work - tabs at the end of the list weren't on-screen, so you couldn't see which tab was the current one! Thankfully CTRL-W works well to close a tab. Still, I'm down to a more mundane 12 now (really), and I have to manually select tabs. It's like the whole index is just wacked. I'll restart it in a bit.

Now that the beta is public, here are a few thoughts on it.

The integration with Firefox is sweet. The sidebar works very well, and I like having it there so I can quickly open any of the feeds which I am monitoring. Well done. The appearance of the Pluck data is also nice. It's an easy-to-use, easy-on-the-eyes interface, somewhere above the bare-bones appearance of Bloglines and the oh-so-pretty look of Newsgator. It could be very usable on a regular basis, and the work on it is very nice.

And... that's about it for the really good stuff. It seems to me like it has promise, but at the moment I find it lacking. This isn't for lack of a product - it's really very well done. It's just that I often find myself looking for functionality that I am used to in Bloglines.

This doesn't mean it won't ever be there, and it doesn't mean that Pluck won't work for a lot of people. But for me, it doesn't quite work the way I want it to work. Bloglines does what I need and allows me the options to change it if it doesn't. Pluck seems very force-fed, in that if it's what I need, great. If not, I need to adapt or go elsewhere.

That said, what don't I like? I'm glad you asked.

While the appearance is nice, I've encountered what appear to be some CSS issues, with sections of text overlapping the next one, and so on. This is especially prevalent when you collapse and expand items, particularly those containing images. Boing Boing is a great example of a feed that sees this happen on a regular basis.

The spacing of the items leaves something to be desired. Each one contains the feed name, even when you are viewing only one feed (and it is also in the sidebar and the title of the tab). Not needed, get rid of it. The date is off on the side and takes up a line all itself. When collapsed, each item takes up a whopping four lines - the feed title, item title, date and a blank line. Too much.

Unread counts don't work reliably. It looks like the unread items are bolded when you first pull up the feed, but then all items are marked as read even if you've only viewed the first page. That doesn't make sense. Because of this, it's nearly impossible to tell where you left off. I really like that Bloglines only shows me unread items, but I have the option to view others if I so desire. Perhaps the Pluck folks will add another toggle to the top that allows for viewing of only unread items, instead of having both read and unread inline, with only a bold title to differentiate them. This reason alone is one that will cause me not to use the service.

While there are loads of references to the feed you are reading, you can't seem to get to the site - only to the individual items. This, despite having the feed in the sidebar, the feed in the breadcrumb at the top of the page and even having the feed title in each individual item. Surely they can allow for a link to get to the site itself.

The one-button collapse/expand function is nice. I really like it. Too bad it doesn't save your settings on a per-feed basis. There are some feeds (think Slashdot) where I find it faster to read in collapsed mode, only expanding as necessary. There are other feeds, such as those of friends, where I read every article and I want them expanded. Why make me click every time I load a new feed? Bloglines allows me to save this setting.

Speaking of those buttons - I think they used to have tips on them when you hovered over them. They don't appear to now - or they don't appear to work. So if I'm curious about what they do, the only way I can find out now is to click them. And the result isn't always obvious. It's a nice interface. Add some tips to make it more usable.

Finally, I like to be able to open links in the same tab or a new tab as I see fit. The sidebar only allows me to choose one or the other. How about making it so that the middle-click can open an item in a new tab, just like it works in the regular browser window?

All-in-all, it's a nice job. I'm happy to see such a good product. But I don't think it's enough to sway me from Bloglines at this point. Perhaps the beta will work through some of these things!

The public beta for the Pluck Firefox extension has been made available for download.

While I'm still a devoted Bloglines user, the Pluck Firefox extension is pretty sweet, and their user interface isn't bad. If their extension picks up some features and things like the unread counts get ironed out, I think Pluck may give Bloglines a run for their money.

While I'd noticed the Use Current Pages button previously, I had never paid attention in order to set up multiple start pages manually. Now I know how to do it. Pipes are your friend.

First, while I do create some software, I am not what should be called a developer. I don't have the experience.

With that out of the way, it seems to me that Firefox (1.0.3) is using up a decent amount of memory on my (Windows XP) system. When it first starts, it uses perhaps 18MB. Within just a few minutes, it's at 20MB - not a huge jump, but a jump nonetheless.

Earlier today I noticed that things were running slowly and I fired up the Windows Task Manager. Firefox was using over 120MB. Now I had not logged off or even restarted Firefox in probably a week. I just leave it running. I also had probably 15 tabs open.

As I started closing the tabs, the memory usage really didn't change. There may have been some adjustement, but nothing significant. This would normally lead me to believe that tabs don't matter much, if at all. When I finally closed Firefox, that memory was released. Starting up again, it's now back around the 20MB figure.

It's certainly possible that something on my system is ill- or mis-configured and causing the problem, but I'm not sure where I'd even look, as the memory appears to be allocated to Firefox alone. It could, perhaps, be the Bloglines Toolkit (or some other extension), but short of uninstalling it I'm not sure how to test that (I will uninstall it to see if it helps). And more specifically, if it is the issue, I'm not sure how to address it.

So I'm wondering if any of you have seen similar behavior, either with or without the Toolkit or other extensions?

Update: In a quick test, I disabled the Toolkit notification, then disabled the extension entirely, so it should not be running. Firefox appears to periodically add 8K or so to the running memory, even without the Toolkit. I'm not sure what this is, only that it does appear to happen from time to time. It doesn't appear to be the Toolkit, though, and for that I'm grateful.

Then I started testing. A fresh load of Firefox, using the local paper, started at about 21MB. This size varies a bit depending on the size of the page you load, but seems to be relatively consistent if I load the same page over and over again for testing.

In any case, those values seemed consistent. So I started adding tabs. I chose this article, just because I happened to find it interesting. Using the Firefox "Page Info" option, it shows the page as 11K. When opening this page as an additional tab (leaving the front page in the other tab), the memory usage jumps up by about 3MB. Opening another tab with the same size results in sizes of 1.4MB to just over 2.0MB for each tab opened.

Those are reasonable numbers - I have no problem with the size in general, as I typically only have a few tabs open, so the footprint is still small - about 31MB in this example, after having the front page and five copies of the article open at the same time (6 tabs total).

The problem seems to come on closing those tabs. I closed all five of the articles, and the memory savings was just over 1MB. So while opening those five tabs added about 10MB to the memory used by the application, after closing those five tabs, just 1MB was released, leaving a net gain of 9MB for no effective difference after closing those tabs!

Update: For comparison purposes, I tried the same test in IE (using windows instead of tabs, of course). The first window was smaller than Firefox - about 19MB compared to 21MB. Small savings, but interesting to note.

The next window added nearly 13MB of memory - all the way up to 32MB, which immediately places it higher than Firefox with all 6 tabs open. Each of the final four tabs required 1-2MB, for a final footprint of just over 38MB. So it ends 8MB higher than Firefox. If you open a ton of tabs/windows, then this could be a reasonably significant number.

Then I started closing windows. By the time I was back down to a single window, I was running with 23MB - just over the initial size. So while IE added 19MB of memory to the running instance, it also released all but 4MB of that after the windows were closed, and perhaps more importantly, the total size after closing those extras was just 23MB - compared to Firefox at 30MB.

Opening the extra windows again resulted in a higher memory footprint at the end, but it still seems that IE is releasing most of the extra memory used, while Firefox is keeping it. More as I play with it some more.

Update: After observing this behavior for a couple of days, I can say with certainty that Firefox does not immediately release the memory in use by those extra tabs, while IE does (for windows). However, it does seem that Firefox will release at least some memory periodically, as I have seen an instance of Firefox go from 100MB to 80MB with absolutely no change in the number of tabs (or even the URLs open in those tabs). So I'm not sure how, but it does seem to free up memory from time to time. Just not immediately.

I could claim that the last entry on the subject was simply an April Fool's joke, but in reality there are two reasons why that is not the case. One is that there are so many such jokes on the internet that the world doesn't need one from me. Two is that it just wouldn't be true.

Read "Another Toolkit Release" »

Thanks to Peter Chu and Xavier Robin, the Bloglines Toolkit is now available in Chinese (Taiwan, R.O.C, zh-TW) and French (fr-FR), respectively. Automatic updates should process this change automatically, or you can use the link to download the update.

Seems that Arvind is talking up some Firefox search plugins. That's cool. I really love the extensibility of Firefox and how it is so easy to add stuff to it. What I really don't get is why you'd want a search plugin. They simply aren't necessary.

I mean if you like having a little drop-down that goes specifically to your engine of choice (and having to click that drop-down list as well), that's great. But I'm definitely much more a fan of the keyboard. Using Firefox Keyword Searches, you can do this without an extension, without a restart and more importantly, without a mouse.

Once you've added a keyword search, just CTRL-L to select the address bar (heck, click it if you are so fired up to use your mouse), then type your keyword into the bar, followed by the search string. That's it!