Things About The Chrome Release That Annoy Me

Ok, I don’t want a long rant about this, but 2 things that bother me. 

1. We never care about EULA’s. Why care about this one? It’s an open source project so even the most absurd clause ever in the EULA is effectively unenforceable. Stop whining, let the lawyers tell us what it means and stop speculating when your an engineer or journalist and not a lawyer.
2. It’s not ‘Apple’s Webkit’ I hate that a great open source project with a lot of companies and contributors behind it gets completely attributed to Apple. While I appreciate that not everyone is going to get credit in every sentence, can we offer some semblance of recognition that Apple is not the only organization working on the Webkit platform? 

Ok, thats all, just wanted to get it out of my system.

Remember The Milk plugin for Mozilla Ubiquity

So I was experimenting with the new Ubiquity extension from Mozilla labs and fell immediatly in love. Needless to say, Twitter integration was great, but I needed Remember The Milk. So, Viola!

rtm_ubiquity

My Ubiquity Feed Page

It’s pretty straightforward, the only command is ‘addtask’ and I think we can all guess its purpose. I’ll hopefully be making it more intelligent soon, its really just a ‘Hello World’ right now.

Swiftfox, why are’t we good nerds anymore?

So the past few weeks have seen me getting more and more frustrated with the performance lockups in Feisty. As a developer who’s been running it for several months now, I can say I’m very tolerant and never upset, just try my best to help, mostly by just finding my own solution. So cruft and buildup is inevitable, lots of random libraries compiled out of the packaging system to get something working last minute, and I know my kernel is a wreck, as its seen more than a few major upgrades. However, when I started to read benchmarks where Feisty was taking a significant beating in startup times, I started to get concerned. I agree with the reasoning that dropping the heavily optimized kernels was a good idea, I had stopped using them a bit before, due to my own stability problems.

Anyways, this prompted me to make good use of my 500 GB external drive, and I am backing up everything as I speak, then doing an all-out optimization of my system with no regards to consequence (just for some numbers/fun ) and then installing the beta fresh (on a LVM’ed hard drive). I hope to have something of a comprehensive optimization guide for Ubuntu after this, but whats most likely going to happen is I get ansey for the new Feisty and LVM

However, as I started my quest for a meaner and leaner Gnome/Ubuntu harmony, I trudged through the debates on prelinks, preloads, and readaheads (do what you will, nothing fantastic either way for me). But the first thing that truly changed my day to day desktop experience and in an incredibly positive way was Swiftfox. Its nothing revolutionary in terms of ideas, its just done well. Swiftfox really isn’t even a separate distribution of Firefox, its almost the exact same code, just with highly optimized releases for each processor. My initial thoughts were that it was going to be worthless, and maybe for your processor, it is, but with the Core Duo, its a world of difference. At first I assumed it was placebo, or something else I had done, but when my benchmarks showed no real differences anywhere else, Swiftfox outpaced Firefox, by a lot.

Just for fun, I have a few links below for rough web rendering performance benchmarks, make of them what you will, but let me say, drop your composting manager first, both beryl and compiz hated me when I tried, its too many rapid refreshes.

http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/test-rendering-time

http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php

http://www.24fun.com/downloadcenter/benchjs/benchjs.html

Feel free to share your times, either way, I’m interested to know if this was a ‘My Firefox was so messed up’ or if Swiftfox is truly that awesome nerd inside that drives the speed of software.

Technorati Tags: mozilla, firefox, swiftfox, ubuntu, gnome, linux, optimize, speed

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