johnmccollum.co.uk

Along with roughly 7,999,999 others, I eagerly downloaded Firefox 3 on release day. Not long after, my stumbleupon toolbar was upgraded to 3.23. Let’s have a look at the changelog:

• Adds tag search via the Firefox 3 url bar.
• Adds bookmark integration in Firefox 3.
• Delivers Send-to pages more swiftly.
• Notifies of waiting sent pages via a more easily noticeable button
• Improves browser responsiveness upon login for users with many Friends.
• Adds tutorial information bubbles for novice users.
• Fixes a bug that could cause the sent page counts on the Send-to menu to stop incrementing if you send several pages in succession.

Cool, seems like it’s all good. Wait, what’s that second one again?

• Adds bookmark integration in Firefox 3.

OK, seems innocuous enough. So I’m stumbling happily along, when I suddenly notice that my bookmarks folder looks like this:

Yep, Stumbleupon is now bookmarking every time I hit the thumbs up! This seems a bit superfluous to me; just because I like a page or want to add a pic to my SU blog, it doesn’t mean I want to bookmark it!

Turns out it’s easy to turn off - Tools -> Toolbar Options -> Search and Tagging -> Save Favorites To Firefox Bookmarks Folder.

OK, I know that this is supposed to be a social bookmaring app, but I can’t help but be a little surprised that this is the default behaviour now!

Does anyone out there appreciate this new feature? Am I just being cantankerous again?

As I mentioned before, I made the switch to GNU/Linux at home some time ago. I talked about the benefits it brought me in terms of PC performance and productivity.

But at work, I’m still firmly rooted in the Windows camp. Why? Primarily because my job involves developing web sites and apps.

Tracking browser usage is a notoriously haphazard affair. According to the much-quoted W3C schools statistics, roughly 53% of users are using Internet Explorer. According to wikipedia, that number is nearly 75%.

Given internet explorer’s ‘unusual’ implementation of web standards - not to mention its market share - it is a necessity to test on these browsers. This is where things get a bit tricky for users of minority operating systems such as Linux, or OSX.

Sure, there are services such as Browsershots which take snapshots of sites using particular browsers, but if you’re anything like me, developing for IE is an iterative process. Make a change, hit refresh. Make a change, hit refresh. Waiting 3-30 minutes to see an update isn’t an option!

I’d be interested to hear comments from anyone who has found a way round this issue.