Re: TVGuide.com now officially useless

Roy Knable wrote:
> In article <1134525850.695122.192100@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, WQ
> <wq@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > --- Well, as I said, that's when you activate the extra set of
> > minimize, restore and close buttons so that instead of closing one page
> > with a visited address before going to another, you simply minimize
> > that page and it'll be stored hidden from view underneath and behind
> > whatever other pages you use after that. To get back to that dropped
> > page, you minimize the page you're currently on, as well as maybe
> > several others before that if you've used that many between the page
> > you want to get back to and your current one, until you end up with a
> > blank browser page and all the stored blocks of pages you've
> > accumulated by minimizing them instead of closing them - and nothing is
> > lost in the process as long you just keep minimizing. Works for me.
>
> Seems like an awful lot of work just to get back to a webpage I
> accidentally close. Other browsers have that "go" menu but Opera
> doesn't. By definition, that's a quirk.
>

--- The "Go" window is a kind of redundant feature since you can find
the same thing by simply dropping down the address bar and getting a
list of your visited sites that way. Select your site and it
automatically gets you back there. Alternatively, if you click your
mouse on the back button and hold on the click, the back button will
drop down a slightly different history menu, which may be where you
would find your links to closed pages.

In any case, I downloaded Firefox 1.5 and gave it a quick test run.
These are my results:

1. I still don't like the toolbar, it reminds me too much of IE and the
icons still look too cartoony. At least with the IE toolbar you can
unlock it to move its segments around the way you like it, I don't see
it as possible with Firefox. Also, you still can't customize Firefox's
toolbar as much as with Opera, it's not as flexible to play around
with, not to mention that I don't get over 300 skins to choose from
according to my mood.

2. If I want the status bar visible, I get more screen view out of
Opera than Firefox. With Opera my actual screen view height is 6 1/8
in., and with Firefox 5 3/4 in. [I still live in the Stone Age with a
14 in. monitor, but I like its compactness]. Opera has the advantage
because I'm able to configure its status bar to appear only when a site
is being searched, whereas Firefox's status bar is either always
visible or always invisible. Yes, this is a minor point, but I like my
status bar, complete with page load-up speed and time counters [which
Firefox also doesn't have] - and I like it to be seen only when it's
relevant and not constantly.

3. But yes, Firefox does allow bookmark icons to be placed on its
toolbar as I have found, and that is good.

4. It's still a very lightweight-featured browser, again not that much
to play with, just the basics. If the basics is all you're looking
for, then in that sense Firefox seems to be serviceable enough and a
preferable alternative to IE. I guess for me I just like toys with my
browser and Opera is full of them, which allows me to personalize its
look and functions precisely and uniquely to my individual liking in a
way that distinctively reflects me - is that being narcissistic or
what?

5. I did a speed test among the 3 browsers, IE, Firefox and Opera. For
each, I punched in the same 7 regularly visited sites to see how long
it took to retrieve them. Here's how it went, in seconds:

SITE FFOX IEXP OPERA
Futon Critic 9 7 5
Google 3 1 2
IMDB 4 4 4
MediaLife 7 8 2
TV Guide 15 10 14
TV Week 14 20 5
Zap2It 4 7 6
TOTAL AVG. 8sec 8.1sec 5.4sec

Speed will vary with different sites at different times of the day
under different conditions, etc., so different results may appear in
another test, but with the above sites at the time I conducted this
test, last night at approximately 12:20-12:25 a.m., it's interesting to
see that the average speed is virtually identical between Firefox and
IE. I really didn't think Firefox would be as "slow" as IE, I thought
perhaps it would be something like an average one second behind Opera.
So I'm not sure where this claim of Firefox being fast comes from. I
guess I'll have to do more extensive speed tests to see if they'll
concur or not with this one. Still, I'm not totally surprised since
for the most part I've always found Opera to be the fastest of all
browsers I've tested in the past and for the four years I've been using
it. And saving on all those surfing seconds over the course of a year
probably adds up to a whole hour of time for other things.

Bottom line: it's all a matter of personal preference and why. I like
my choice of Opera skins, I like all the toys that come with the
browser that, once configured, make my surfing speedier and more
efficient, and I especially like the fact that Opera no longer has an
ad banner, which really frees up my toolbar for more stuff that I want
to put on it without affecting the maximized height of the screen view.
Also, while Firefox seems to have a pop-up killer by default, it's
nowhere to be found by my superficial check of things in order to
configure it. Why would I want to configure it? Some sites won't work
properly without the pop-up killer disabled. I don't know yet if this
is the case with Firefox, if you can still get a pop-up on a site in
order for you to get additional info from it or type stuff into it even
if the pop-up killer is working, but if not, then that just means you
have to revert to IE to do what you want to do with "friendly" pop-ups,
or Opera where you can configure the pop-up killer to be modified or
disabled. Anyway, the quibbles are basically minor, but essentially
Firefox is okay as a frills-free alternative to IE [I still wonder
about its actual speed, though, judging by my initial test], but it's
just not feature-rich or speedy enough for me on my computer with my
high-speed connection the way Opera has always been.

Nice try, but no cigar.

> > > > nor will I likely be
> > > > able to add some of my bookmarked icons to the toolbar to instantly
> > > > click onto regularly visited sites without having to type in addresses
> > > > every time.
> > >
> > > Why not? Firefox has a bookmarks toolbar and it can import Opera
> > > bookmarks.
> >
> > --- Yes, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can go into
> > your bookmarks list in Firefox and drag the bookmarked site icon
> > [that's created by Opera and would only appear in Opera] straight up to
> > the toolbar to drop it in there so you can instantly get to your
> > bookmarked site by clicking on that icon via the toolbar instead of the
> > bookmarks list. That's a particularly efficient Opera feature to have
> > for frequently visited sites. But I think maybe I'll download Firefox
> > 1.5 now and see what it's really been up to lately.
> >
> > > http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_Importing_Opera_Bookmarks
>
> I'm still not grokking you. That link I provided says you can import
> all Opera bookmarks into Firefox. It might take you a couple of minutes
> to reorganize the imported bookmarks in the Manage Bookmarks window,
> especially if you have bookmarks organized into many folders, but other
> than that, you should quickly have a fully populated bookmarks toolbar.
> Firefox, like all other modern browsers, has always had a bookmarks
> toolbar and it's easy to save any page you're on directly into it by
> selecting Toolbar when the Add Bookmark dialog comes up.

.