Busy times and browsers

Some of you probably noticed I haven't been around as much as usual this week. Been doing some major furniture rearrangement here at Monkey Central, so now I have my own desk in a corner of the living room and my feet aren't being warmed by the rear vent of my server machine and cramped by my scanner sitting on top of my printer any more :). Also, we have more shelves. Took a while but it's definitely a lot nicer now.

Edit: illustration is always appreciated, isn't it?

This morning I've been looking at the world of browsers again. I'm still keeping Midori up to date in Mandriva; it's a lot more mature than it used to be, now, but it still has some deal breakers for me: if you set it as your default browser then click on a link in another app it opens a new window (not a new tab as I'd prefer), and it has no capacity for ad blocking. It's definitely improving at a fast rate, though.

Epiphany has one deal-breaker: its in-built adblock is nowhere near as good as AdBlock Plus for Firefox. It lets a lot more ads through and doesn't re-flow pages. Using the Webkit build of Epiphany (which you can do pretty easily just by rebuilding the .src.rpm with a different option on Cooker), the adblock extension doesn't work at all. The developers tell me they may have this working by March.

So I'm still stuck on Firefox, sadly. I'd really like to get onto something that's less of a memory hog and better integrated into GNOME. I tried running Firefox 3 beta 2 for a week or so, and it's just a trainwreck...it doesn't seem any faster to me, slower if anything, and whoever designed the new URL autocomplete system thingy was clearly on more crack than Amy Winehouse. That thing is hideous. So I don't have very high hopes for Firefox's future, it just seems to be going the way of Netscape; every new version proclaims that it's faster and sleeker and smoother and the echo chamber blogs all agree and hype it as the Best Thing Ever, till somehow we'll wind up at version 5.0 knee-deep in useless features and options and memory wastage and someone will have to come up with a new Phoenix to start the cycle all over again.