Bringing back the favicon on Firefox 14

On its way to chromify Firefox, Mozilla removed the favicon from the URL bar on Firefox 14. I agree with their reason, saying that one could use the favicon to emulate the secure connection padlock, but in my opinion it should be disabled by default, being optional to bring it back. Not all Firefox users are newbies or morons.

Fortunately, a guy called jooliaan published an addon to bring the favicon back to the URL bar, and it works just like it should. The addon is called Favicon Restorer, and I highly recommend it.

The way it goes, Mozilla is killing Firefox version after version. We love Firefox for what it is; if we wanted something that looks like Chrome, we would just use Chrome. Wake up, Mozilla.

A trick to auto hide Chrome download bar

If you make a quick search, you’ll find how many people are annoyed by Chrome’s download bar, which doesn’t hide itself automatically, and requires you to manually hit the “X” button. There is no way to automate this through the extensions API, nor the browser gives you any option.

However, I found a simple trick to close the download bar, and it’s so simple that it’s hard to imagine how no one had this idea before – I didn’t see it anywhere, by the way. Not exactly automatic, but it’s better than click that “X” button.

Here’s how: you’ll have to use two shortcut keystrokes. The first one is Ctrl+J, which opens the download tab. The silver bullet is that this download tab displays the download progress, thus automatically closing the download bar. Then, once you have the download tab opened, just hit Ctrl+W, which closes the current tab, and it’s done.

So, by hitting Ctrl+J and Ctrl+W in succession, you’ll be free from clicking the “X” button on the download bar.

I hate the new Gmail look

I’ve managed to keep the classic Gmail look until today, when all of a sudden Gmail morphed irreversibly into the horrendous new interface, gray and white, without colors or contrast. The option to revert to the old good look cannot be found anymore, so that I’m stuck into this ominous thing! And the built-in themes don’t help!

I’m about to install Stylish addon and slap some CSS over this ugly interface, which I hate with passion. Let me say it again: I hate the new Gmail interface, which seems to have been inspired by the nothing.

Google is becoming more evil day after day.

My Firefox addons

Just to mention, these are the addons I’m using today on my Firefox 10.0.2:

• Adblock Plus 2.0.3 — Blocks all advertising content according to filters. I use to install this addon wherever computer I am at, and apart from a few subscriptions, I also have a couple rules of my own.
• Download Statusbar 0.9.10 — Replaces the traditional download window with small progress bars at the bottom of Firefox.
• Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus 1.2.1 — Extra functionality to Adblock Plus, easing the process of select specific elements within a page for adding blocking rules.
• F6 0.2 — When working with the tabs on top, when you hit F6 key you put the focus on the tabs, instead of the address bar. This addon makes sure that the address bar will be focused when you hit F6.
• Flagfox 4.1.12 — Displays a flag from the country where the site is from, not by its country code top level domain, but rather by its server location, determined by its IP address.
• Forecastfox 2.0.21 — Adds a weather monitor on the toolbar, displaying current weather and temperature. I was told the data is picked up from airports. It has shown to be fairly accurate.
• UI Fixer 1.4.4 — Rearranges the horrible design of new Firefox interface, for example, restoring the text on the titlebar and placing the orange button at the toolbar.
• Undo Close Tab Replacement 6 — Shows a list of the most recently closed pages, so any of them can be reopened again.

How to install Chromium on Windows

Note: This post was updated on February 20, 2014.

Google Chrome is a modern browser, the most advanced one we have today. But unfortunately Google, on its way to world domination, uses it to silently collect personal data from you. Yes it does, even with those anti-privacy options unset – and it further links the information to your Google account, what is even worst. But there is a way to enjoy this amazing browser, away from Google’s eyes: directly using the open source project which feeds Chrome: Chromium.

Since I couldn’t find a decent tutorial anywhere, I decided to write my own, this step-by-step guide on how to download and install Chromium on Windows.

Chromium is usually used by the developers, but it’s also available to anyone who wants. This excellent post explains in detail how the versioning works. The Chromium builds for Windows are published on Chromium repository. These builds are made automatically by the buildbot. Beware: this is the cutting-edge repository, so any version may have bugs (if you find a bug, just download another version, by the way).

You’ll notice that some build numbers are missing: it happens because the buildbot only publishes the builds which pass 100% through all the automatic tests. The most recent build number which was published is written down as latest good known revision. I prefer to download the latest build of previous version, the one who became the Chrome beta stage, which is likely to be fairly stable.

The current (February 20, 2014) Chromium version under development is 35, therefore I recommend to get the last build of Chromium 34 (build 252031) which can be downloaded here.

History of last builds:
23 (2012-09-20) 157677, 24 (2012-10-30) 164895, 25 (2012-12-19) 173798, 26 (2013-02-13) 182231,
27 (2013-03-27) 190946, 28 (2013-05-08) 198631, 29 (2013-06-26) 208550, 30 (2013-08-14) 217340,
31 (2013-09-25) 225096, 32 (2013-11-05) 233008, 33 (2013-12-17) 241258, 34 (2014-02-20) 252031.

Although named “chrome”, this is in fact Chromium. Once downloaded, unzip the chrome-win32 folder into your “Program Files (x86)” folder (if in Windows XP, into your “Program Files”). Then doubleclick the chrome.exe file, and it will automatically do three things:

• create a shortcut to Chrome on your desktop, which you’ll probably want to drag into your start menu;
• create a small Registry entry at “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Chromium”; and
• create your profile folder on the following directory:
  • on Windows 7: “C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Chromium”
  • on Windows XP: “C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium”

At this point, Chromium is ready to run.

To update Chromium: Chromium doesn’t have automatic updates, you must do so manually. To update the Chromium version to the latest (or rollback), just download and unzip the “chrome-win32” folder over your current one, overwriting all files. Your profile folder isn’t touched.

To uninstall Chromium: these Chromium packages don’t create uninstall entries on the Windows Control Panel. To uninstall Chromium, you must essentially undo all the steps done on the installation: delete the “chrome-win32” folder, the shortcut, your profile folder (if you want to remove all your personal stuff) and the Registry entry.

And that’s it. Enjoy this great browser.

Follow up (Jun/2017): I stopped tracking these a while ago, but I released the app I developed to check the Chromium releases: Chromium Peeker is now open source.

uTorrent is dead

Last month, my uTorrent client – actually written as “µTorrent” – updated itself to version 3. Well, I always was a huge uTorrent fan, mainly because it’s simple and lightweight, as its slogan says.

But after that update, I had a surprise.

The new uTorrent interface showed itself full of gadgets, lots of new buttons and a bunch of useless new features – I totally hated all that stuff. What about that slogan? It took me some time to figure out how to hide all that stuff from my eyes, so that I would see only the torrent list. After a couple weeks, I began considering rollback to the previous version.

The last stable version of the 2.x branch is uTorrent 2.2.1 build 25302, which albeit has a bug where the tray icon never goes away, corrects some memory leak bugs from 2.2, among others.

Since the new versions probably will remain bloated, I’ll stick with 2.2.1 until I find another client worth changing – at this moment, I doubt I’ll find one. Also, after completely remove 3 and install 2.2.1, I instantly noticed a performance increase: version 2.2.1, being much more simple, is faster as well.

Quoting Leonardo, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

The browser version race

The browser wars is a good thing, since you have the browsers competing for the market share by offering improvements and new features. The truly winner of the browser wars is the browser user.

However, there’s another war in course, which I read about a couple weeks ago, and they named it the version race, or the version wars. It seems that providing new features and improvements on the browsers is not enough anymore: one must provide a freshness of a “new browser”, and this is being achieved by increasing the major version number each new release. As a programmer myself, I found it really annoying.

Version numbers have their significance, and it’s being lost now. Let me explain one of the most common interpretations: for example, let’s take the “1.7.4” version number. Here, the “4” is the release number, and it should be increased each time the developer publishes some correction, bug fixing or some minor feature which doesn’t break compatibility with the current version.

The “7” is the minor version number, which is increased each time you have a significant new feature, maybe with some minor compatibility break (usually corrected by the program itself), but despite the improvement, you’re still on the same major version.

And the “1” is the major version number, which is increased every time you have a big change on the program, often with a significant part of the source code being entirely rewritten. It’s almost like a new program under the same name.

I remember when Google Chrome browser was launched in 2008, and everybody was amazed with its fast evolution, with a galloping major version number increasing. Then at some point, with so many major version numbers (and minimal improvements), people simply didn’t care about it anymore. In the future, when Chrome really have something new to show… it will be just another version number, because they wasted the whole arsenal of numbers already.

The worst: Mozilla entered the version race with Firefox 5 in June of 2011, which should have been versioned just as “4.1”.

An alternative to this is join the Microsoft boat, which likes to use years as version numbers, like “Office 2010” – although internally they follow the regular version number convention. This year-versioning is good, because it gives you a clear sense of time, you quickly associate the program with “how old” it is. Maybe a month/year versioning for the browsers, since there are several versions within a year. But what about “Chrome 7”? What do you associate it to nowadays?

Version race leaves a blurry track behind the software evolution. Stop the version race.