When­ever I need to find Fire­fox in task man­ager, it doesn’t ever take long. Fire­fox is the fat kid of web browsers… it’s kind of hard for it to hide. If it once were a sleek, lean fox, today it’s caught just a few too many stray chick­ens and drunk a lit­tle too much of Bean’s apple cider. It wouldn’t take any bull­doz­ers to find this fox, just a mod­er­ate sized key­board with three keys (no prizes for guess­ing the three-finger’d salute).

I haven’t had a great day with Fire­fox. Well… I spent 3 – 4 hours in meet­ings today, so I didn’t even have that much time with Fire­fox! Still man­aged to let me down twice, though.

Damn its indis­pos­able devel­op­ment tools *sobs uncontrollably*

I think I’ll switch back to Opera for all non-development Internet-related activ­ity for a while… unless any­one has any other browser rec­om­men­da­tions? I’ve seri­ously thought about IE7, but its ren­der­ing is still just a lit­tle too patchy for me to be able to live with myself as an Inter­net user.

Bleh. Let it be observed: even high-profile open source does not always lead to a good prod­uct. Its mem­ory man­age­ment is noth­ing short of repul­sive. It will reg­u­larly use more mem­ory than Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor com­bined — admit­tedly, I use Pho­to­shop mostly for web pro­duc­tion and not high res­o­lu­tion print stuff (though that does hap­pen a few times a week, and it won’t often go far beyond the 350MB that Fire­fox seems to man­age fairly regularly)

I’m still using CS2, so there aren’t any mag­i­cal CS3 mem­ory man­age­ment advances that make such a claim pos­si­ble… Fire­fox just sucks :P

I’d blame Win­dows being in need of a rein­stall (it’s been run­ning since Octo­ber… more than six months with­out death :P Plus I started out not being happy with it because it’d been installed from the guy I bought the com­puter off, I just hacked it to use my CD key instead of the one he’d used to test things… so it’s never been per­fect), but really, it’s not that bad for any other appli­ca­tion. I nor­mally do a reboot once a week and things are fine… heavy duty graph­ics edit­ing, occa­sional video edit­ing, con­stant mail and occa­sional word­pro­cess­ing… and of all those things it is a web browser that can’t get it right. Per­haps I shouldn’t be so deri­sive about it see­ing as I make a liv­ing off devel­op­ing in this rel­a­tively sim­ple world… but I am.

The flip side to all of that, of course, is that I’ve been try­ing to live (more) like a nor­mal user the past few years. Essen­tially, recog­nis­ing that it’s sim­pler to buy soft­ware than write it (Word­Press, Flickr), using hackably-open tech­nolo­gies instead of truly open ones (WMA Loss­less sans DRM), and a gen­eral aban­don­ment of open source prin­ci­ples in favour of vastly improved pro­duc­tiv­ity (Pho­to­shop, Pre­miere, Office 2007, royalty-free stock).

It’s cer­tainly paid off in terms of pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment and enhanced cre­ative poten­tial… but there’s some­thing lost in not being able to hack visu­al­i­sa­tions hooked up to a web­cam together on a command-line any­more. Admit­tedly, that sort of thing only comes around half a dozen times a year! But no mat­ter, it’s all good fun. Given more friends who were into that sort of thing and some good music, I’d so live in the party house. I’ve not fig­ured out how to do the same command-line video tricks using Win­dows just yet, so next time I’ll prob­a­bly use Win­dows for visu­al­i­sa­tions (woo par­ti­cle emit­ters!) and a sep­a­rate Linux-powered lap­top (maybe?) for web­cam trick­ery. Then I’ll take web­cam stuff straight out into Win­dows cap­ture and skip my vis mixer alto­gether for once… I gotta learn to travel lighter anyway!

Tags: hackably-open technologies, Illustrator, Internet user, Linux, task manager, web browser, web browsers, web production, Windows