Surprisingly, Vivaldi hadnât notified me of any updates for monthsâI was on v. 2.05, and had no idea that they were up to 2.10. Having upgraded manually, I noticed its handling of type had deteriorated. Here is one paragraph in Lucire:
My font settings had also changed.
Coincidentally, I downloaded Opera GX last night to have a go, and it displays type in the way Iâm used to:
Since both are Chromium-based, and Opera is sensitive about privacy as Vivaldi is, I decided to make the change and see if I like the new browser better. I was used to Operas of old being independent, not Chromium-based, but the good news is I could use the same plug-ins.
Iâm missing Vivaldiâs easy screenshot process and its clipping (Opera GX has something similar but introduces an extra step of saving the file) but so far the browsers arenât too different in terms of everyday functionality. Opera GXâs extensionsâ window isnât as well organized and I have to scroll to tinker with the settings of anything later in the alphabet.
The unchangeable dark theme takes a bit of getting used to (but it matches my laptop, so thereâs that), and thereâs a GX home page thatâs superfluous for me.
I donât need the built-in ad blocker out of principle, but I do have certain anti-tracking plug-ins (e.g. Privacy Badger) that I was able to install from the Opera shop without incompatibility.
Hard-core gamers may like the CPU limiter and RAM limiter, to make sure the browser doesnât eat up capacity for their games. Itâs not something I need concern myself about, but I can see it being handy. I remember when old Chrome (many years ago) and Firefox (more recently) began eating memory like crazy with my settings (no idea why), and this would have been useful.
But as someone who reads online a lot, itâs important that type is properly handled. I donât know what Vivaldi has done to its type rendering, and thatâs probably the biggest thing that tipped me in favour of change.
Iâve found some forum entries about this, but they date back to the beginning of the decade. I alerted Jetstar to this in March, and the problem has worsened since then.
Basically, I canât book online, and I donât know why. Consequently, I booked one flight with Air New Zealand and only managed, after huge effort, to get the other (for a colleague) with Jetstar.
Back in March, I couldnât book with Vivaldi, but I was able to switch to Firefox. I let Jetstar know.
Now, this strategy does not work.
Before you suggest it, cookies and caches have been cleared.
Hereâs what happens after Iâve selected the cities and the dates, and I go to select times. Letâs begin with Vivaldi on Windows, which is based on Chromium (which, as we know, is what Chrome, the browser Jetstar suggests you use, is based on):
Switching to Firefox now results in this:
Switching to Edge on the same PC gives this:
Fortunately, I also own Macs, so hereâs what Firefox for Mac returns:
The only browser that works with the Jetstar website: Safari on Mac. As I’ve sold my Ubuntu laptop, I was unable to test using that OS.
Not many people would go to that effort, and while Jetstarâs Twitter staff (after some pushing from me in DMs) said they would refer it on, I donât expect anything to happen. Maybe Chrome would work, but Iâm not ever going to download it to find out. Why invite Google on to your computer? But if that is the case, it seems foolish to limit yourself to such an invasive browser. My experience is that whatever is blocking me from booking with Jetstar (some may argue that this is a good thing), it is expanding across browsers.
You have to wonder if the online census this year has been intentionally bad so that the powers that be can call it a flop and use it as an excuse to delay online voting, thereby disenfranchising younger voters.
Itâs the Sunday before the census and I await my access code: none was delivered, and I have three addresses at which this could be received (two entries to one dwelling, and a PO box). If itâs not at any of these, then thatâs pretty poor. I have been giving them a chance on the expectation it would arrive, but now this is highly unlikely.
And when you go to the website, they claim my browserâs incompatible. I disagree, since Iâm within the parameters they state.
This screen shot was taken after I filled out a request for the access code yesterday. Statistics NZ tells me the code will now take a week to arrive, four days after census night. Frankly, thatâs not good enough.
While Iâve seen some TV commercials for the census, Iâve seen no online advertising for it, and nothing in social media. My other half has seen no TVCs for it.
Going up to the census people at the Newtown Fair today, I was handed a card with their telephone number and asked to call them tomorrow.
Youâd think theyâd have people there at the weekend when weâre thinking about these things. Letâs hope I remember tomorrow.
And I’m someone who cares about my civic duty here. What about all those who don’t? Are we going to see a record population drop?
I’m not alone in this.
Same friends feeling disenfranchised for not having a computer. I understand reasons for online census but I think organisation and comms around it leave somewhat to be desired.
So how many people on NZ Twitter have or haven't received their letter yet for Tuesday's Census?
— Sarah Hendrica Bickerton 👩🏻💻 (@sarahhbickerton) March 3, 2018
and there are a lot of people among her circles, myself included, who donât have the access code. Kat’s story is particularly interesting (edited for brevity):
Third call to Census NZ about getting a form for another dwelling on the property. This is specifically a question they talk about on the letter we got with our code, but operators are unable to issue extra codes. The request goes up to the supervisor.
When a field officer called around to give you a form, they sorted out issues like a second dwelling at the time, right there. They had authority to do so. They answered questions, and made sure you knew what you needed to do.
And I can't help but surmise that low socioeconomic communities are going to be the ones who: a) most likely won't have the time or inclination to fill in another bloody form for the government, let alone proactively pursue it b) need to be represented in the stats for funding
Online systems are robust and can be successful.
Itâs just that they need to be backed up by people with a will to make things succeed, not people who are so intent on making them fail.
Earlier this week, I installed Vivaldi browser, and decided to make it my default after reading CEO Jon von Tetzchnerâs blog post about the potentially corrupt practice of suspending his companyâs Adwords campaign after he was critical of Google.
I have resisted browsers made from Chromium because I was never sure how much went back to Google, but seeing von Tetzchnerâs honest blog post about Googleâs alleged misdeed made me think that Vivaldi would likely look after my interests as a netizen.
It wasnât the only reason, mind. Firefox, and before that, Cyberfox (a 64-bit Firefox that had been my default for quite some time) had begun eating memory on my computer. The memory leak would still happen after I got rid of many extensions, and even on safe mode, Firefox took up a lot more space than I expected. Firefox had been having issues with certain ads from some networks for months, too, resulting in script errors.
It didnât take much time for Firefox to chew through 6 Gbyte, freezing other programs that I relied on, and crashing Windows altogether. It happened right after I installed a Crucial SSD that I bought from Atech Computers on Cuba Street, but fortunately I didnât blame it on the new gadget. Logic prevailed and I discovered the culprit, though an upgrade to Universal Media Server didnât help either: 6.7 is poorer than 6.5, confusing video files for JPEGs and forgetting what had been recently played. (Like Windows 10, which regularly forgets settings, modern software seems to have a memory poorer than its users.)
A screen shot of the Windows 10 Task Manager shows just how much memory Firefox ate in around 10 minutes, whereas at this point Vivaldi had been on for quite some time.
It mirrors the experience I once had with Chrome, which handled memory and web pages so poorly that I began calling it the ââAw, snap!â browserâ because of its regular crashes. The same problem that cemented my use of Firefox (and Waterfox and Cyberfox) has now happened to Firefox, forcing me to look for an alternative.
First indications are that Vivaldi is a well made product, with a built-in screen-shooting feature and notes. There are some things that are harder to get to, such as a menu where I can customize which cookies should be blocked (I like living in a YouTube-comment-less world; I feel my IQ is preserved as a result), but overall Iâve managed to get myself the right extensions to mimic what I used to do on Firefox. Iâve also switched off the Google phishing and malware protection setting, for obvious reasons, blocked a bunch of cookies from dodgy big US tech firms (Google among them), and done the ad opt-outs.
It might be marginally quicker, though if I was just interested in speed, Blaze beats Vivaldi and Firefox hands-down, and has a smaller memory footprint. However, a browser is not just for pleasure for me; if it were, then maybe this blog post would have been about another browser altogether. Iâve downloaded Blaze for my phone, and Iâll try it out soon.
I wonder if this is a longer-term change. I remember beginning surfing on Netscape 1, and if I recall correctly, 1·2 had just come out so I actually began browsing in colour. Netscape stayed good till 4·7, and 6 was bloatware and truly awful. I switched to Internet Explorer 5 at this point, before moving to Maxthon (when it had an IE core, but its own interface). Firefox had issues back then with typography, preventing me from switching, but as it matured to v. 3, I went over and wasnât disappointed. Chrome also had typographic issues for a long time.
I invested a lot of time troubleshooting Firefox with the devs over the years, so I donât make this move lightly. But there comes a point when a piece of software becomes impractical to keep. Firefox hadnât changed much on the surface yet when it forces two hard resets a day, you have to make a hard call.
If it werenât for von Tetzchnerâs blog post, I mightnât have made the decision to use his companyâs browser quite so readily. But it is a good product, even at v. 1·11. Vivaldi has obviously invested into making a decent browser from day one, and itâs not just for technologists and power users, which some seem to think. The fact it works better than Firefox should automatically make it appealing to the bulk of users, and if its CEO isnât afraid to call a spade a spade when it comes to Google, the general public should be impressed.
But, as weâve seen, an honourable stand doesnât always mean success: Duck Duck Go hasnât overtaken an increasingly suspect Google, and people still flock to Facebook for social networking despite that platformâs privacy gaffes and unanswered questions about its forced downloads. I only hope that Vivaldi stays the course because the public deserves a product that hasnât come from a morally questionable source.
Since the Firefox for Windows updates in November, I’ve had a big problem with the Mozilla browser, and the Waterfox 64-bit version based on it: they won’t display text. I had to downgrade to Waterfox 32.0.3 for the last month or so, but it’s begun crashing more and more regularly (from once a day to thrice todayâI visit largely the same sites, so why does software “decay” like this?).
On the latest incarnations of Firefox and Waterfox, linked fonts work, but the majority of system fonts vanished from the browser. And, for once, I’m not alone, if Bugzilla is any indication. It is probably related to a bug I filed in 2011.
I’ve had some very helpful people attend to the bug reportâit’s great when you get into Bugzilla where the programming experts resideâbut sadly, a lot of the fixes require words. And, unfortunately, those are the things that no longer displayed in Firefox, not even in safe mode.
As many of you know, there’s no way I’d switch to Chrome (a.k.a. the ‘Aw, snap!’ browser) due to its frequent crashes on my set-up, and its memory hogging. There’s also that Google thing.
After some searching tonight, I came across Cyberfox. It’s not a Firefox alternative that comes up very often. Pale Moon is the one that a lot of people recommend, but I have become accustomed to Firefox’s Chrome-like minimalism, and wanted something that had a Firefox open-source back end to accompany it. Cyberfox, which lets you choose your UI, has the familiar Firefox Australis built in.
I made the switch. And all is well. Cyberfox forces you to make a new profile, something that Waterfox does not, but there isn’t much of an issue importing bookmarks (you have to surf to the directory where they are stored, and import the JSON file), and, of course, you have to get all your plug-ins and do all your opt-outs again. It also took me a while to program in my cookie blocks. But the important thing is: it displays text.
You’d think that was a pretty fundamental feature for a web browser.
The text rendering is different, and probably better. I’ve always preferred the way text is rendered on a Macintosh, so for Cyberfox to get a bit nearer that for some fonts is very positive. It took me by surprise, and my initial instinct was that the display was worse; on review, Firefox displayed EB Garamond, for example, in a slightly bitmapped fashion; Cyberfox’s antialiasing and subpixel rendering are better.
Firefox and Waterfox on Windows 7
Cyberfox on Windows 7
Here’s where the above text is from.
Gone is the support for the old PostScript Type 1 fonts (yes, I still have some installed) but that’s not a big deal when almost everything is TrueType and OpenType these days.
The fact Cyberfox works means one of two things: (a) Cyberfox handles typography differently; or (b) as Cyberfox forces us to have a new profile, then there is something in the old profiles that caused Firefox to display no text. That’s beyond my knowledge as a user, but, for now, my problems seem to be solvedâat least until someone breaks another feature in the future!
PS.: That lasted all of a few hours. On rebooting, Cyberfox does exactly the same thing. All my text has vanished, and the rendering of the type has changed to what Firefox and Waterfox do. No changes to the settings were made while the computer was turned off, since, well, that would be impossible. Whomever said computers were logical devices?
Of yesterday’s options, (a) is actually correctâbut how do we get these browsers behaving the way they did in that situation? In addition, the PostScript Type 1 fonts that the browser was trying to access have since been replaced.
Thank goodness for mates. Decent people out there prepared to tell me when I screw upâyou know who you areâand when Google screws up.
One friend had the decency to tell me yesterday that he could not access Lucireâs online edition. This is what he saw:
It’s not the first time Google has blocked a site of ours through no fault of our own. Something very similar happened about a year and a half ago with this blog. But I had been wondering why our traffic stats had been down for over a week and why the search queries started looking more niche than usual. I originally just blamed the summertime malaise (in the northern hemisphere) though the overall traffic was a lot lower than the same period in June 2011.
It turns out that a single GIF on the page from Blogarama, a site Google identified as spreading malicious software, made Chrome go all panicky.
I’m not saying it’s wrong of Chrome to be cautious, nor do I suggest Google contact everyone who has content from a reported site on their page. But I wonder if it was overcautious in this case and whether its technique is the right one.
I don’t use Chrome, for very good reasons. However, on Firefox, with the McAfee plug-in, the content to dangerous sites is blocked, not the whole page. It gives a warning at the top of the browser, saying that potentially malicious content has been blocked. That seems to work all right and it would at least allow people to get to the content they want safely.
I will give Google credit on one thing, however: once the Blogarama GIF was removed, it lifted the block within hours.
After this issue with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, I went to the McAfee forums to record it so others knew.
The McAfee volunteers and tech support guys have, in the last while, been fantastic. There’s one volunteer there, Peter, who’s always been right. So I would be foolish to ignore their advice. You can read the thread for yourself but after following these registry-cleaning suggestions, I downloaded IE9 again.
Result: the same. IE9 doesn’t display anything. Pages are either all black or all white.
It’s even more worrying when you realize Internet Explorer cannot display its own page at Microsoft:
That’s two out of two fails. It’s official: IE9 is the worst browser on the market and an absolute waste of time.
Not that I would have ever used itâit was more intellectual curiosity to see how it compared to Firefox 4, Chromium and Opera. Conclusion: it doesn’t.
I was prepared to put up with the epic fail of IE9, since I hardly use the program. In the years I’ve had IE8, I’ve only opened it accidentally (e.g. when certain programs are removed, they load IE for the ‘Why did you remove it?’ customer screen).
But I forgot one thing: some programs rely on IE to display their information, like the Windows sidebar gadgets and McAfee.
Bit of a problem when IE9 doesn’t actually display anything.
So Microsoft’s ineptitude has consequences that reach far further than its crappy browser.
I wish I could tell Microsoft. Many, many years ago, after registering some Microsoft product, I was asked to sign up to the Microsoft Network. So I did.
Then, one day, Microsoft insisted that I sign up for a Microsoft Passport, because this was the one sign-on that I needed to get in to every one of its services. Well, I didn’t use any other than registering software. But I did anyway.
Problem: that no longer works, because Microsoft now insists that I sign up for a Windows Live ID.
MS, this is just stupid.
In 1999, we had a Yahoo! Group list. We no longer run it after we moved our users on to an in-house mailing list. And, you know what? My little company, a fraction of the size of Microsoft, will still honour the requests from the old Yahoo! members.
If we can keep old user data, how come Microsoft can’t keep hold of registered customersâ data and move it over to each successive service? How can I be assured that this doesn’t actually hook me up to a third Microsoft service when in fact I only expect one?
Or was MSN for the 1990s, Passport for the 2000s, and Windows Live for the 2010s? That we have to change each decade because Microsoft doesn’t work on a long-term basis?
Even though quite a few people suffer from the blank screen problem of IE9, Microsoft won’t be hearing it from me.
I understand that this bug had plagued IE9 even at beta stage, if the McAfee forums are to be believed.
You’d think it would be pretty serious if an internet browser couldn’t display, but it looks like Microsoft never fixed it for its final release.
The one thing it did right was providing instructions on how to remove IE9, which I followed tonight. I am glad my gadgets have returned, along with text in my McAfee security program.
Frankly, I don’t think McAfee or any other software developer should rely on IE to deliver screens, though I can understand why, with the standardized installation of the program in Windows.
What a pity, then, that Microsoft cannot deliver a browser that works with its own products.
I am happy to say that Firefox 4 Release Candidate 1 is working smoothly with no crashes to date. It reminds me of, well, Firefox 3·0, before Mozilla started doing weird things to it and we had the multiple-crashing 3·5 and 3·6. Let’s hope this situation lasts.
Meanwhile, the bugs I reported to the Chromium people in October and November 2010 have finally received responses. It’s too long compared with Mozilla. I told the chap that I had given up on Chrome, but I downloaded it today just to see where things were at.
Based on the latest Chromium, the incomplete font menu bug has, indeed, been fixed, though various font-changing ones still appear present. There are still font-linking and character-set issues. (The images below have had their colour depth reduced for faster loading.)
Above and left: When Chromium hits a ligature, the line or part of the line changes font. Opera does something similar: it changes the font of the one word that contains the ligature.
Left: Chromium might just decide to change fonts anywayâlikely a Postscript error already sorted in Mozilla thanks to the likes of Jonathan Kew.
Above:The font-linking problem on the home page of Lucire still has not been solved. There is no problem on IE8, Firefox or Opera. I can’t report on IE9 as my psychic powers are not strong enough to determine what is being told to me through the heavenly dimensions.
Above: This one paragraph is properly linkedâwhat causes it to work and the others not to is unknown.
Above: Go outside the regular Latin set, and Chromium falls all to pieces, just as it always did.
Above: At least there are fewer font changes than last timeâthough Chromium continues to struggle with soft hyphens.
Meanwhile, after I reported spam faxes (a breach of the Telecommunications Act) to Telstra Clear, I was surprised to learn that my case was never examined. I had to open a new ticket with new faxes today. The excuse was the backlog of work post-Christchurch earthquake and, in the circumstances, I had to accept that.
One was for a law firm, as far as I could make out. I wouldn’t hire a lawyer who breaches the Telecommunications Act. They shot themselves in the foot with that one.
My main reason for calling, however, was the Text-a-Park service that the WCC offers. I hate cellphones, but had brought one with me on one of those rare occasions, and decided to give the service a go. I fed in the code, dialled 7275, and was told by the meter that the transaction had failed. No parking ticket was generated.
Just as well. I prefer to use a credit card anyway, and fed that in. I got my ticket and my credit card was charged.
Problem: as I walked away from my car, I received an SMS saying (sic), ‘Thanks for using TXT-a-Park. Your transaction for $6.50 has been accepted.’ I have no idea how one gadget says it’s failed and another says it’s succeeded, and my quantum physics isn’t good enough to figure out into which alternative universe this supposedly successfully printed ticket went to.
Of course, the charge appeared on my Telstra Clear bill today.
There’s a reason that jokers like me don’t use cellphones. Because, each time we do, they bite us on the bum. Though a buttcheek bite is better than testicular cancer.
I’d urge folks to check their billsâif you haven’t received a ticket from a Wellington parking meter, and you still got charged for it, then give the telco a call.
