Monthly Archive for December, 2007

Firefox 3.0b1 on OS X Leopard quick review

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 5/12/2007
in Browsers
. 3 Comments

I downloaded and installed the beta version of Firefox 3.0 a few days ago and have been using it since on my OS X Leopard laptop.

I also installed the Proto theme for Mac Firefox which significantly enhances the look of Firefox 3 on the Mac.

firefox 3.0b1 on OS X Leopard

My initial impressions of Firefox 3.0b1 are very positive. It is fast, stable, looks really sweet and many of the memory issues which have dogged Firefox appear to have been fixed.

To expand on the memory comment, in Firefox the memory used to leak so the longer it remained open, the more memory it consumed. I have had Firefox running on this Mac now for several days with up to six windows open some of which have up to twenty five tabs running. Currently this is using 1.38gb of virtual memory. At the same time, Safari which has one window open with two tabs running is consuming 1.41gb of virtual memory!

Another change is the ability to Star and Tag bookmarks. Personally I prefer the way Flock allows you to bookmark directly into Del.icio.us.

One disadvantage of running the Firefox beta is that none of my favourite plugins now work but at least Del.icio.us have a bookmarklet which runs well out of the bookmarks toolbar so I can still bookmark there from Firefox.

The release notes list a raft of improvements under the headings:

  • More Security
  • Easier to Use
  • More Personal
  • Improved Platform for Developers and
  • Improved Performance

Overall, I like it. It seems much improved, more responsive and less of a memory hog. Shades of good things to come!

Does Plaxo flood your inbox with connection requests?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 3/12/2007
in social networks
. 7 Comments

Plaxo started life as a place to hold your contact information online.

That was quite handy and they allowed synchronising from your Mac or PC so your contact data were always held safe in the cloud.

More recently Plaxo added a feature called Pulse. Pulse allows you to tell it where you publish photos, blog posts, bookmarks etc. and it creates a lifestream, a la Facebook which it publishes to your Pulse network.

All sounds nice, right?

Sure, however, for some reason, and I don’t know why, of all the social networks I have joined (and I have joined a few!) Pulse seems to generate the most emails. The emails typically have the subject line “[someone I have never heard of] has added you as a business connection”

On Facebook and Xing, the other two social networks I frequent most, I occasionally get connection requests from people I don’t know. But not very often, and usually a bit of digging will show how they are connected to me.

However, on Plaxo I get waaay too many of these business connections and I have no idea where they are coming from.

Is this just me or are others finding Plaxo also generates too many connection requests from strangers?

Virgin Atlantic’s great ad

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 3/12/2007
in advertising
. 3 Comments

I saw this ad for Virgin Atlantic on Manuel Montilla’s blog the other day and i haven’t stopped laughing since (ok slight exaggeration) - see what you think

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