firefox 4.0

the beta5 is working fairly well, and my favorite plugins like no-script, foxy-proxy and firebug work well. Firebug seems to have some documented minor issues but this does not affect to me.

FF4 has two big visible changes, the tabs on top (like google's chrome) and panorama view for grouping tabs (upper-right corner). This is a nice feature, but when you create several groups I have not found how to cycle between them without the mouse. For me is easier to put tabs in different windows and in my mac I can F10 to see the windows and select one (like in panorama when selecting between groups) but I can also alt-` to cycle between ff4 windows, so I can change swiftly between conceptualy grouped tabs, for example from the journals window to the bloger-mail window when writing an entry in my blog.

What I miss is an option to list all windows and tabs opened and be able to select the wanted one. This is just the opposit of when you start firefox from a stored session and an error occur and gives you the list of all the windows and tabs so you can deselect the unwanted one. This options should be somewhere but I have not discovered yet.

firefox 4.0 beta 6 (how to use it along firefox 3)

The firefox 4.0 beta is in the 6th release. This is the first ff4 release that I have tested.

Firefox uses only one process for all windows, so you can not open two different firefox at the same time. Well, you can but not with the same profile. So in order to use ff4 without losing my ff3 plugins and usability I need to create first a new profile and then a symlink to launch ff4.

1.  first of all install ff4 with another name

• I tried to raname ff4 in the dmg installer but was not possible, so used the terminal in my mac
• cp -r firefox.app /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Applications/Firefox-4.0.app

2.  Create a new profile

• In my macOS (change your path for  linux or windows), open the terminal and type:
• /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Applications/Firefox-4.0.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager -no-remote
• Then add a new profile "ff4"

3. Create an alias in your .bashrc
• alias ff4='/Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Applications/Firefox-4.0.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P ff4 -no-remote'
• -no-remote tells firefox not to use the running instance but create a new one. You can use only one profile at a time though.

Note: you can copy your data from the older profile to the new one if you wish, or create a backup:

• rsync -av ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/n6jajvmu.default  ~/personal/firefox_backup

blody scribefire: why are you inserting zamanta tracking services to my blogposts without warning!!!!!!

Short story:
WTF! I have discovered that scribefire add a tracking service at the end of all my posts without any explicit warning:

<div class="zemanta-pixie">
<img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=[long%20tracking%20number%20here]" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div>

This is an invisible image for tracking purposes. This is ON by default, but at least you can disable from options/publishing/Automatically insert invisible tracking pixel for statistics gathering.

The guys at Scribefire are not playing nicely!! They should advertise this thing explicitly and also in the option they should put a link explaining what this 'statistics gathering' is for.

-20 for Scribefire!!!!

Long story:
Scribefire is a useful blogging tool. But I don't trust third part plugins. So I put all of them in quarantine after installing them and after each update (you never know if other not-nice-company has bought them after your last check for niceness).

Scribefire was not different. First of all I don't trust them (not anyone else) to give them my google mail password in order to be able to upload the post. So I created a new google account only for blogging and give access to my main blog.

Also I don't trust the wysiwyg editors not adding rubbish to the html so I always edit in html.

The problem came when I needed to add an image: I selected to upload it with my google api and I was expecting the image to go to my 'picasa', but it is uploaded to a place that I don't lh5.ggpht.com know with no explanation:

<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1DqEzpVc8tomJYXwbPc015XvtepfaK2haffW6krD4ikLXB88wJuOSWyb2BdXGPQaZ8NuROTp1C1ft23WQSohwdRi4qJ757swJQn6C4rau6TPQBKXg13Ka47v1Cm4BNtAf4cAzvP7QXIWY/?imgmax=800" />

As I am paranoic with these things, I decided to upload the post as draft and add the photos myself in blogger. But When I edited in html the blog I saw this infamous Zamanta tracking image at the end!!!!

I saw that other blogs are reporting this since one year ago!!!
http://www.simonscullion.com/2009/03/17/scribefire-zemanta-and-a-hidden-tracking-image/

Please ScribeFire you have the rigth to make your software as you please (trakings, addware, advertising etc) but respect my rights of having an INFORMED DECISION on my choices. There are a lot of bad guys around doing nasty things, so good guys should be as open and clear as possible and you are not doing very well at that respect. Shame on you!

Also this is very annoying. My blogs are my blogs and you don't have rights to put things there without my permission!!!!