No:The-Me

Why do I prefer FireFox over Google Chrome

Many a times, when I use a friends computer to access emails or browse the web, I happen to ask them, "Do you have FireFox installed?"

99% of the times, I get the answer, "No, but we have Google Chrome, which is a better and faster web-browser!!"

I generally give them a lengthy explanation, why you should use FF. FF has some amazing plugins, which makes things so much easier.

For example, see the attached screen shots, one on FF with AdBlock Plus and the other from Google Chrome And tell me, which one do you prefer?

Now to the memory usage bit. I am running Ubuntu Karmic Koala, 9.10.
Firefox has 3 tabs open, Gmail, FaceBook and the Chromium bugs site. Plus I have an adblock plus and a tab mix plus adons running. It consumes a total of 73.2 MB

Chrome with the exactly same tabs open, minus the ad-ons is consuming, 34.4 MB + 38.9 MB +27.1 MB + 8.6 MB + 592.0 KB + 17.5 MB ~ 127 MB
I can see three processes with the name chromium browse and 3 process with the name chromium browser. Just the curious kinds, I am attaching the screen shots of the memory manager.

See for yourselves and decide.

Firefox menu fonts

The default menu fonts on Firefox in ubuntu look pretty bad. I mean they are too big and bulky, in contrast to the nice and crisp ubuntu fonts.

Here is what I did to overcome the issue.

Create this userChrome.css  in ~/.mozilla/firefox/{whatever}.default/chrome/ & put the following code inside it & restart FF.

window {
 font-size: 12px !important;
}

menubar, menubutton, menulist, menu, menuitem, textbox, toolbar, tab,
tree, tooltip
{
   font-size: 12px !important;
}

And adjust the "12px" to whatever looks right. "px"="pixels", obviously. You could try point sizes with "pt" instead;
then, if your DPI is set properly, the values should be the same as for everything else.

I found this solution from the various ubuntu forums.

EDIT: Also, goto about:config and search for layout.css.dpi and change value to '0' from '-1'

Learning The Hard Way

The son of a master thief asked his father to teach him the secrets of the trade. The old thief agreed and that night took his son to burglarize a large house. While the family was asleep, he silently led his young apprentice into a room that contained a clothes closet.

The father told his son to go into the closet to pick out some clothes. When he did, his father quickly shut the door and locked him in. Then he went back outside, knocked loudly on the front door, thereby waking the family, and quickly slipped away before anyone saw him. Hours later, his son returned home, bedraggled and exhausted.

"Father," he cried angrily,

"Why did you lock me in that closet? If I hadn't been made desperate by my fear of getting caught, I never would have escaped. It took all my ingenuity to get out!" The old thief smiled.

"Son, you have had your first lesson in the art of burglary."

Ecofest 2009 - 7 & 8 November