Firefox 3.0 Experience

The much hyped Firefox 3.0 was released yesterday(Jun 17th). I too wanted a copy installed in my work PC which incidentally is a Linux Box. I have never installed Firefox in my Linux box in a single attempt! Anyhow, i successfully installed a copy in my PC after struggling with it for some time.


Some of the good features i noted about Firefox 3.0 are,

• A lot faster than Firefox 2.0
• Smart location bar(which was frustating factor initially...simply rocks now)
  
• Fonts looks smoother
  
• Taggable bookmarks
• Smart Bookmarks(Which lists Most visited sites and recently bookmarked pages)
  
• Offline support!
• Integrated Anti-virus(off-course for windows alone)
• Enhanced Add-on manager and download manager
  
• Integrated Feed reader
• Cool password manager(No more ugly save password dialog)
• Better session and crash manager.

Well, every product has its ups and downs. All we hope is lesser downs on products we use :). Some of the downsides of Firefox 3.0 are,

• Crashed a couple of times in first one hour
• Native look-and-feel. This totally sucks in Linux(but looks good in Mac). If i have to make it look better in my Linux Box, i have to tweak my Linux UI Manager. Even current themes dont solve the problem fully!
• Partially lost my toolbar bookmarks(was able to recover it from my older version though).
• Higher(yet adjustable) memory usage(noticed only in Linux box)
• Most of the addons installed on the earlier version is yet to get compatible with Firefox 3.0
• Will kill you with proxy username/password dialogs if u dont click 'Ok' button on time. My firefox once opened 100+ of those dialogs!
• Ugly border appears on all text boxes while typing on it.(happens in linux, not sure in windows)
  
• Had real time to get it run in my Linux box

The smart location bar that Firefox 3.0 sports was really one of the frustrating factor initially. But the bottom line was, it needed some time to adapt with our browsing habits. Firefox brings up sites list as we type in the location bar. Earlier, it was done with a simple starts-with check(if u type goo, firefox brings up www.google.com in the top of the list). But in Smart location bar, if we type goo, it will bring up reader.google.com if you used to visit reader.google.com quite often than google.com. i.e. the sites are ordered based on the visits.

One downside of Smart location bar is, it takes the title of the site we have visited in to consideration(which means, if you have often visited gmail many times and try to type mail.yahoo.com, gmail will be listed first).

On the whole, Firefox 3.0 is far better and lot faster than its earlier version(though it needs few improvements). Its sure to give IE(and other browsers) a run for the money!

p.s:

A little insight on how to run firefox in Linux successfully if you ever get the below error
Error: in guard: symbol required but got: Error: fatal: looped fatal error

This was the error which made me go bonkers while installing Firefox 3 in my Linux box(Mandriva 2008). After a lot of googling, I found out that the issue was due to the UIM(ver: 1.4.6) installed in my machine. To run Firefox, there were just 2 options left. I either have to install the latest(1.5.1) version of UIM or uninstall UIM from the machine. 1.5.1 version of UIM is not available for Mandriva 2008, so i had to uninstall UIM(which actually is not useful for me) through drakconf to kick-start Firefox in my machine .

10000 B.C(2008): Review

I have a special inclination towards prehistoric movies. 10000B.C is one such movie directed by Roland Emmerich. Being the director of great movies like The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day and The Patriot, i expected this movie also to be in the same lines. But 10000BC proved to be one big utter waste to time.

10000BC revolves around the life of a young Mammoth hunter named D'Leh. For some funny reasons our prehistoric hero and his tribe mates could speak English real fine. A young girl(Evelot) whose tribe was ransacked by another dangerous tribe called "Demon Tribe" comes to D'Leh's tribe and its 'love at first site' for D'Leh (because there was no other girls in his tribe).

D'Leh's father used to be the tribes leader once. He ran away from the tribe when D'Leh was young creating a bad impression among his tribe members. This incident made the other kids brand D'Leh as "Son of a coward". Time for the current tribe leader to pass on his throne to the next bravest person had come. One who brings down the 'Lead Bull'(Mammoth) will be termed as the bravest and hence the next leader. D'Leh somehow manages to bring the lead bull down and gets the throne and the girl(Evelot).

The very next day, the demon tribes hunters come to D'Leh's place and takes many of the tribes as slaves with them. Evelot is one among them. Rest of the story deals with how D'Leh saves Evelot and other slaves from the demon tribe people.

I, basically wanted to watch this movie for the below reasons.

• Roland Emmerich(who eventually did not live up to his expectations)
• Saber tooth(which actually came only in 2 scenes)
• CGI(the only thing thats good in this movie, but for the Saber tooth parts)
  

But the storyline turns out to be a ditto of Apacalyto with the mixture of few parts from Path Finder, told using the narrative style of 300. The only difference between the climax of 300 and 10000BC is D'Leh did not miss his target!. I could recommend this movie to one who haven't seen the above movies(coz, this is a 3-in-1 movie).

The director even got most of the historic details (like Pyramids in 10000BC, English medium barbarians , mammoths in desert) wrong. Bottom line is, 10000BC is watchable once if one has the ability to watch movies with their brains switched off!