I installed GreaseKit for Safari, and it’s rather glorious. Runs userscripts, just like Greasemonkey (Firefox) does. Maybe Firefox *doesn’t* have the extension monopoly around here.
is where THE GRAPHIC DESIGNER talks about things. Like web design. And icons. And egg rolls.
You might find no useful information at all.
But I know you will read on like a true champion.
You can even go back to the homepage if you really desire it.
September, 2009I installed GreaseKit for Safari, and it’s rather glorious. Runs userscripts, just like Greasemonkey (Firefox) does. Maybe Firefox *doesn’t* have the extension monopoly around here.
It’s highly unlikely that you’ve heard about this, since I didn’t actually blog about it, but I divorced Safari 4 a week ago. We had a long and faithful time, but Firefox, in all its glistening wonder, finally pulled me in.
My reasons not to use Firefox boiled down to this:
Later on, I realized the reason for point 1: I’d installed a theme called GrApple Crisp, which apparently extended Firefox’s opening time from six seconds to around forty. Probably a fluke, but nevertheless, Safari starts up in a couple seconds. Taking off GrApple Crisp made Firefox start up about half as fast as Safari, which is still fairly admirable. Shortly after this I found FlashBlock, which serves almost exactly the same purpose as clicktoflash.
The benefits of Firefox’s limitless extensions outweighed the speed of more lightweight Safari for the time being, and I switched my default browser. And that’s where you would have come in, if I hadn’t been a lazy bastard and instead had posted something on my rotting blog. Instead, we’ll move along the timeline a week.
By this time, I’ve been working on Retronet (new forum skin for Metanet Forums, something of a snazzy internet community) for a time span around six days. I originally intended to use CSSEdit to flesh out the forum layout, but it wasn’t to be. CSSEdit lags horrifyingly after a certain point (if you try to use a background image too large, think 2000 pixels square (hey, it was a sprite (it’s on here: enormoussprite.png, you’ll find it in the CSS))), or if you try to edit too HTML-heavy pages—like forums. Instead I used Firebug, whose praises I sung somewhat less than usual—it really does feel less impressive after you’ve tried something as powerful as CSSEdit, in which you can write new selectors and get more efficient live preview—but which was another benefit of Firefox. No other in-browser web developer tools compare with Firebug. Eventually I needed to test a forum feature that showed up only for guests, and since I was logged in as administrator to edit the stylesheet, I could hardly open a new tab and log myself out again.
So I opened Safari, and I was completely stunned. Safari—which had not cached any of these forum pages, as it hadn’t been opened in a week—was rendering the front page at least a couple seconds faster than Firefox. And it was doing it consistently. I was browsing my local forums—local files, mind you, very little server latency here—twice as fast as I used to. This was unexpected.
Then I realized that I had my own complaints with FlashBlock as well, which was cumbersome, laggy, and more temperamental than the frankly unassuming interface of clicktoflash.
Thus I’ve come full-circle. I use a mix of both browsers now, Safari for casual browsing and Firefox mostly for web development. I figure there should be a conclusion in this post somewhere, but it’s not really a formal essay, and frankly speaking, I’ve always sucked at conclusions.
I’d like to dedicate this next post to Bio…for breaking the ice.
Yes, only moments after he posted his insightful comment about my latest Wordpress theme, testdrive.joeldt.net got attacked by a spambot. And when I say “attacked by a spambot” I mean “116 comments which contained links to sites that don’t exist, by users with names that have no meaning whatsoever, in a spam span of not much more than five minutes.”
(grammar: you can substitute those two phrases for each other, and they make perfect sense, even though they look weird separately)
Fortunately, Akismet was able to block much of the peskiness, and all I really lost was the time it took to scroll through 116 messages in Mail with the subject line “[testdrive] Please moderate: ‘A paginated post’.”
Good day.
Minn is another minimal theme (did the title tip you off?). The point of this theme was to see how few template files I could use and still create a decent setup. This theme is composed of four files: index.php (with lots of conditional tagging), functions.php, style.css, and sprite.gif (the arrows in the navigation and sidebar). I could have omitted the sprite and used some other placeholder but it’s 131 bytes so w/e.
It’s entirely possible that this theme won’t work if you don’t have the default theme installed on your system, but I haven’t checked.
XHTML 1.0 and CSS3 valid.
Tested in IE8, Firefox 3.5, Opera 9/10, and Safari 4.
It also supports Yoast Breadcrumbs natively.
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Close this offensively large box! I wanna go back to browsing!