I just wanted to take a minute to give a big thanks to a few developers who have, in the last year, made my internet experience a dramatically better. First, a huge thanks to Ben Goodger for all his work on Firefox and to Scott MacGregor for Thunderbird. I honestly believe that these are now the best web browser and the best e-mail client on the planet.
One of the things that really makes these apps shine, in my opinion, is that they don't try to do everything -- to satisfy every oddball user on the face of the planet. They focus on being clean and fast with a very solid featureset that would satisfy most users. Niche features are left to extensions.
I, being one of those oddball users, am hooked on a few extensions so I also have to thank Henrik Gemal for Linky, Myk Melez for Forumzilla and now Chris Neale for URIid.
I've used a lot of extensions, but Linky and Forumzilla are in a different class from all the others. They are permanent and I use them as integral parts of Firefox and Thunderbird. Without the efforts of Henrik and Myk, my internet experience wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable.
This evening I spent a couple of hours re-writing my browser and mail (for Forumzilla) userContent.css files to take advantage of the new URIid extension and even though I've only had this for a little while, I can already tell that this is going to be a permanent addition (at least until bug 238099 is fixed). URIid gives me the web browsing satisfaction that other features like pop-up blocking and junk-mail controls do and I think this functionality is something that I just won't be able to do without.
So a huge thanks to Ben, Scott, Myk, Henrik, and Chris. You all rock!
Thanx for the nice comment!
I'm soo glad that people are using my extension!
Posted by: Henrik Gemal on April 22, 2004 11:56 PMAh, shucks. :-) I'm just glad that Forumzilla can be useful for y'all.
Posted by: Myk Melez on April 23, 2004 12:28 AMI second the raves about Linky. It's an essential extension for any serious porn/Mars surfer. :)
Posted by: David Tenser on April 23, 2004 03:23 AMI installed forumzilla and nothing happened. I'm guessing my folder pane is the left side in the mail/news view, right? How can even make sure it is installed or it supports Mozilla 1.4 that I'm using?
Posted by: tekumse on April 23, 2004 07:25 AMI've got to try URIid, sounds cool :)
Posted by: wheerdam on April 23, 2004 07:35 AMI really want URIid, and I installed it. But now I have no idea what to put in the userContent.css.
The stories under news.yahoo.com have css that sets td line-height to 16. I would like to make it 20. Could someone point me to an answer?
Thanks!
Posted by: Bill Ruppert on April 23, 2004 08:53 AM@tekumse: Forumzilla needs at least Mozilla 1.5.
Posted by: trev on April 23, 2004 11:22 AMBill, try adding something like body[id="weblogs-mozillazine-org"] {display: none !important;} to your userContent.css file. If things are working, that should effectively prevent you from reading any of the mozillazine hosted weblogs ;-) Actually, don't do that -- but you get the picture.
You could do something like body[id="weblogs-mozillazine-org"] div[id="links"] {display: none !important;} and that would hide most of the blogrolls in the mozillazine-hosted list of blogs. That misses mine, I thikn because I call that id "links2" but a change to the rule to say div[id^="links"] would probably get them all. I'm no CSS expert, but it's simple changes like this that I'm using URIid for.
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on April 23, 2004 02:16 PMHow about :
#news-yahoo-com td {
line-height: 20px ! important;
}
I don't think Firefox and Thunderbird are the best in their own categories yet. Firefox is still quite unstable, and god knows how many number of improvements Thunderbird need to be competitive.
I think many people give too much respect to these programs by the mere fact that they are competing with Microsoft and that they are open source. I think the products themselves should warrant praise, not the fact that they are competing with Microsoft.
My Firefox experience is getting worse and worse these days. It freezes sometimes, it crashes some other times, its download manager seem to be slower for big files, many sites (especially polls) just don't work. I am still using it, but it is mostly because I like searching with it, when I need to read many pages simulatenously it seems to be useful. Until Longhorn I will continue to use it, but when Longhorn comes I am very much doubtlful that I will ever use Firefox again.
At this point, it looks like more and more developers are needed for Mozilla. Very few people are working on it and they seem to think that whatever they are doing is great because people around them praise them a lot. That's really good for positive attitude, but over the long run it may give the illusion that they are really doing better than Microsoft. People should think more about how to recruit developers, since developers just do not work for free.
Posted by: Chris on April 24, 2004 07:07 PMChris:
In my opinion Firefox is getting better all the time. I look forward to 0.9 (and then the bug-freeness of 1.0). There's very little else I want added to Firefox (although there are a host of small bugs I do want fixed).
Thunderbird...that's another story. It's true that it's good, but I have to agree with you: it's nowhere near the quality of Firefox. The UI looks nice, but it's not as clean as that of Firefox. There are a bunch of little things that detract from the experience - its penchant for opening little windows of nothing every so often being one, its ugly Account Settings dialog being another, and the slowness at doing some tasks over large numbers of email *without showing a progress bar/dialog* being another. I use it because I know my email is safe and can be read by nearly anything. It's also got roughly the features I need, and I don't think it's missing much that I could want (unlike the various minor features I want for Firefox).
In the end tho, I would certainly recommend Firefox to a user, but Thunderbird I leave as an "if you're interested" download for now.
Posted by: Jeff Walden on April 24, 2004 11:56 PMAnd no, Chris, I really don't think Firefox is unstable. It only rarely crashes on me, and when it does I'm usually trying to make it do so.
Posted by: Jeff Walden on April 24, 2004 11:57 PMChris, thanks a lot, that did the trick! The actual entry I ended up needing was:
#story-news-yahoo-com tr,td,th{
line-height: 20px !important;
}
Doesn't that selector affect td, th everywhere, and only tr at yahoo ?
Posted by: Chris Neale on April 26, 2004 09:58 AMChris:
Yes, as I discovered shortly after making that posting!
So how do I limit it to stories.news.yahoo.com? I'm confused!
Posted by: Bill Ruppert on April 26, 2004 11:54 AMI finally read Chris' comment closely enough to realize what he said, got rid of the th/tr and it works great! Thanks!
Posted by: Bill Ruppert on April 26, 2004 07:35 PM