There's a monster on my breakfast!

Perhaps my vast rate of Muller Corner conspumtion has angered the Muller Men, and they have sent a soldier to stop me from eating my breakfast today.

Or perhaps not. This is an excelent example of Augmented Reality, where a computer generated image (the monster) is overlayed onto a live video feed from a webcam.
The computer knows where to put the monster because of the black and white glyph I placed onto my yoghurt. You can even turn the glyph around, and the monster turns around too.

Oh well, at least the Muller men haven't going to get me yet!

FireFox - On the seventh day

Today is the last day of my testing of FireFox :(
I will share my overall opinions, and a side-by-side comparison of FireFox and IE.

First, my opinion of Mozilla FireFox 3.1:
Mozilla is quite new to the market of internet browsers, with FF 1 released in late 2004, it has only been in the game for around 5 years. However, by 'borrowing' features from other popular browsers such as IE, it has managed to quickly catch up with the other contenders, and is used by around 22% of people as of March 2009.
It has many features that IE does not have, and with it being open-source, Add-ons for it are readily available from 3rd-party developers. If it does not have a certain feature, someone is probably developing an add-on for it as we speak.
This I feel gives it an edge over IE.

Now for my comparison:

Category	FireFox	IE
Ease of use	5 / 5	5 / 5
Speed	5 / 5	4 / 5
Features	4 / 5	4 / 5
Aesthetics	5 / 5	5 / 5
Compatibility	5 / 5	5 / 5
Overall	24 / 25	23 / 25

I think that, while IE is a great browser, it has cornered the market for too long, and it is time for someone else to take over, in this case, Mozilla. I am not saying that IE is bad. I have used it for my entire life, and have only now decided to move over to FireFox, but only after testing it for this site, and seeing how good it was. I never thought that I should change browsers before, but now the opportunity has arisen, and I feel I should grab it by the horns and take it!

Jamie

FireFox - Nice touches

Today is the penultimate day of my FireFox road test, and I am sad that it is almost over. But, there is more in store, as today I will be writing about the finishing touches that make FireFox just that little bit better.

I was playing around with the settings today, and how you can set FireFox to, when started, to open up the previous tabs you had open when you closed it. This can be very useful, as I found when browsing fro programming help on the net, I could close FireFox down, and still have the good pages I had found available when I re-opened it. However, this does get annoying when all you want to do is start afresh, and do a google search, for you have to browse to google, instead of it being right there already. (Google is my homepage).

Jamie

FireFox - Day 2

Today I began my real testing of Firefox. I downloaded some big files, tried some of the addons, and most importantly, saw if it actually allowed me to go about my daily use of the internets. All 6 of them.

First came the downloading part. I downloaded some products from file sharing sites like CNet, and File Hippo.
When downloading multiple files simultaneously in IE, a seperate download window is required for each, so the desktop quickly becomes cluttered with drip-fed download windows.
In FireFox however, all the current and recent downloads are congealed into a single download window, where you can see the state of as many downloads as you want. I love simplicity.




Simple.


Not ideal.

One test down, 2 more to go. I don't blame you if you leave now. IE is depressing.

FireFox, like IE, allows you to install addons to the browser, to make it easier to use, or to add cool flashy things to the menu so you can show off your FireFox bling to your nerd friends.
I have never used the addons in IE, so this test is probably unfair, but what the hell.
I downloaded one of the recommended addons for FireFox, AutoPager, and set it to work. What AutoPager does is with sites like Google, LifeHacker, and others, it loads the next page of text/results/pictures of funny crap, and stitches it to the end of the page you are viewing, for 'infinite scrolling of content'.
The truth is, it really works. I have tried it on Google and YouTube, both of which are advertised as working on the AutoPager site. Here is what the break looks like in between pages:




It even gets rid of the header...

So, with both of the 'additions' tests done, I tested FireFox's ability to browse the internet. A key point for an internet browser.
Having 2 browsers installed at the same time probably didn't help, but IE seemed to suffer withdrawal symptoms from me moving to FireFox, and slowed down to an almost unusable state. FireFox blazed ahead, and continued to run unhindered.
Altogether the FireFox browsing experience is quite good. The menu is lovely (sorry, but it is), it is quite fast when browsing large pages, and the usability is awesome.

If my maths are correct, which they most definitely are, that's FireFox 3, IE 0.
Sorry Microsoft, but IE sucks.

Jamie

FireFox - First Impressions

The first thing I noticed with FireFox is the truly beautiful menu at the top. Sure, it is a lot like the IE menu, but it is awesome, you have to admit.
Here is a side by side comparison. Click for larger images.






I then began to surf around a little, and came to the Mozilla Ad-Ons site, which is secure HTTPS. I looked to the elegant menu bar and noticed a banner smiling at me saying that I was on the Mozilla Corporation's website. This apparently because of the HTTPS status of the page.




I then discovered that the banner was in fact a button! Upon clicking it excitedly to see what knowledge it would excrete into my eyes, a small, boring window appeared. All it told me was that I was connected to 'mozilla.org', that the page was deemed safe by GlobalSign, and that my connection was 'encryted to prevent eveasdropping'. Gripping stuff.




The only useful piece of information the window gave was where the company lived...
*evil maniacal laughter*

Jamie

Migrating to FireFox

I am a very microsoft-based person. I have all the products available, and am even a beta tester for the new OS, Windows 7. I therefore decided that I should exchange one of my most used products, IE 8, for the closest competitor equivalent, in this case Mozilla FireFox 3.1 Beta 3.
This week I will be using solely FireFox, and will comment on it on this site. You can keep up to date with my ramblings by looking at this page every day (add it to your favourites).
I would do the Nerd thing and tell you to subscribe to the RSS Feed, but I can't get that working at the moment, so for now, you'll have to do it the old fashioned way.

Jamie