Firefox

A few days ago I saw a report on cross platform browser security, and the fact that a large percentage of browsers people are using are insecure, regardless of their underlying OS. The assumption of Windows being the malware magnet also widened out to include OSX and Linux. It focussed on the plugins and addons not being updated and patched frequently. While that's valid, it raises other points.

Like most web designers / developers I use the Firebug addon for Firefox. It's a little bug on your status bar that lets you open a pane in the bottom of your browser window and inspect elements of the page you're on. It's fantastic for tracing where some part is getting it's style info from. I work with Drupal, Drupal themes often have multiple layers of CSS info. I've noticed recently that it deselects stuff when you mouse away, I've also found a workaround.

Earlier today I wrote a blog post about an odd thing I've experienced in Iceweasel on Debian Squeeze. I've since been accused of calling Debian "evil" or at least implying it by a known IRC troll. That was not the intent, but hey, exaggerating and misrepresenting is the trademark of a troll isn't it?

I've noticed an odd pattern of behaviour in Iceweasel (the unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox that comes with Debian) on Debian Squeeze. It randomly pops up a dialog box telling you that it has to restart Iceweasel to remove or update an addon, and gives you a choice of "restart" or "cancel". What it does not do is tell you what the offending addon actually is, or what it's about to do.

I've found an unusual solution to using Identi.ca on my old P4 desktop that I thought I'd share. To be fair it's a split solution between my desktop my new Samsung Galaxy Portal Android phone. I found that any GUI Twitter / Identi.ca client consumes quite a few resources to have sitting open all the time on the notification applet, some are worse than others. So I now split it with Twidge, Shorten URL and Mustard.