Chrome Shines While Fat Lady Sings for Opera, Firefox and MSIE

I'm very hard to impress, an old school hard core programmer that detests software bloat from lazy assed programmers using poorly implemented cross-platform development environments.

I like fast and lean code, shit that makes an old laptop look all shiny and new and maybe that's why Google named their new browser chrome cause this fucker shines.

It was only yesterday that I threw my hands up in the air and ran screaming from Firefox 3's latest fat, bloated leaky slower than shit browser and declared Opera was one hell of a fast alternative.

Unfortunately, for all of Opera's speed there was a few quirks that meant it wasn't a 100% solution after all starting with the fact that some javascript in Horde Webmail (used in Plesk) had a few problems so it was only 95% usable, still workable and not a show stopper. 

The show stopper was Opera's copy & paste was unable to properly render text to an HMTL editor as the full HTML content that had been copied from a web page was stripped down to plain text. Plain text is expectected when you paste into something like Notepad, but not when you paste into an application capable of negotiating the data type and wishes to receive the full HTML content from the browser.

For us old school Windows programmers this is CLIPBOARD 101 kind of shit and Opera failed the class miserably.

Guess what?

Google chrome in BETA didn't have the javascript glitches in Horde Webmail and it knows how to properly paste HTML text, something Opera has had years to perfect.

Both Opera and Chrome are fast but the devil is in the little details and so far Chrome is in league with the devil.

OK, Chrome doesn't ship with Java, appears to crash with Quicktime (who gives a shit besides Apple and all their cultists) and has a few other plug-in problems, but for a BETA it's fucking phenomenal, it's DA BOMB!

Although I have to ask Google one simple question:

Where's the goddamn TITLE bar and the STATUS bar?

Don't make me drive down to Mtn. View and teach you Windows 101 coding, come on, these should've been there from the get go.

Other than that little peeve, and the lacking of security control given by Firefox add-ons like NoScript, I'm totally stoked. I'll cut Google some slack and assume they'll remedy the missing title and status bar, include Java, fix the quicktime crash, etc. and provide more control over javascript.

Google, a damn fine first showing, hats off, kudos, just fix the rest of this and I'm a solid Chromer for life.

BTW, I'm posting this using Google Chrome so this fucker does work.

YEEE HAW!

Opera 9.5 Smokes Firefox 3

The latest Firefox 3 upgrade was just pitiful and the memory footprint was fatter, it seemed to be leaking memory, page loads just crawled at a snails pace, it was an overall hog.

The options were limited:

- Go back to MSIE 7, which isn't much better, or

- Give Opera one last try as I've always found something that stopped me from using Opera in the past.

Well, the first thing I noticed is Opera 9.5 is faster than shit and loads some pages 3x-5x faster than Firefox, especially my own blog which makes Firefox choke. The second thing I noticed was the footprint of Opera 9.5 is about half that of Firefox when it loads and operates.

Seriously, Opera loaded pages so much faster than Firefox it felt like I was using a new computer!

So now I'm going to give Opera a try and see if there's any gotcha's that will stop me from using it but so far it's looking really good and I may just be the next Opera convert!

BTW, this blog post is my first in Opera!

MJ12BOT's Dirty Little Secret

Many of you have seen MJ12bot hammering your site from IPs all over the world, both the legit crawler and the fake virus version 1.0.8 as well.

"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.2.3; http://www.majestic12.co.uk/bot.php?+)"

Everyone likes an underdog and we tolerate these crawlers when they claim such a noble purpose:

We do spider the Web for the purpose of building a distributed search engine with fast and efficient downloadable distributed crawler that will enable people with broadband connections to help contribute to, what we hope, will become the biggest search engine in the world.

It's been crawling for years and I've never seen any traffic from this damn thing, has anyone?

Then the "offshoot" of this so-called search engine emerges which is Majestic SEO which claims to be a "a commercial offshoot from Majestic-12".

What do they do with the data gathered when they crawl your site?

Here's a direct quote, including typos and bad grammar:

competitive reports are now avaialble, you can buy credits and then use them to see information any domain!

So let's get this right, if we let you crawl our server then you'll let our competitors buy information that can be used against us?

We have a simple solution to this distributed problem:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MJ12bot
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Compete with that.

FireFox 3 Bloated Leaky Pile of Shit

Firefox 3 with all it's much anticipated upgrades turned out to be a big fat flop that's annoying me to the point I'm thinking of switching back to Internet Explorer or giving Opera a try.

Some of the new features seem interesting but overall it's slower, bloated, and appears to be leaking faster than the Titanic after a close encounter with an ice cube.

The damn thing starts at about 40MB and just grows and grows.

Here I'm sitting with a lousy 2 tabs open after using it for a while and it's holding 100MB of memory and not releasing it.

Maybe it's one of the 2 plug-ins I'm using causing the leaks, who knows, but this hog is almost intolerable as it just grows and grows.

Ah well, you gave it a good run Mozilla, time to look elsewhere.