Brettia

I kept Firefox open for an obscenely long amount of time today and eventually it slowed down considerably. This was a rather common problem for me with version 1.0 up until 1.0.7, but I’m now using Firefox 1.5 RC1. I don’t know if this was a regression where an old bug “unfixed itself,” or if it’s because of a new bug entirely (either in Firefox or in one of my extensions, but I hope it gets fixed before Firefox gets released formally in the next few weeks. Aside from that, it’s proving to be quite a release (as it should be, after a year of work), with support for native SVG, graphics drawing with Canvas, XForms (extension required, I think), drag-and-drop tab reordering, automatic updates that actually work and don’t download the entire setup file for each new revision, a back-forward cache to make going backward and forward faster, a redesigned options dialog, and lots of other bug fixes and security enhancements.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past year (tomorrow is the anniversary of the release of Firefox 1.0), hurry up and download it already. Use it once and you’ll never look back. If you’ve been using Firefox 1.0 for a while now, try out the first release candidate for version 1.5. It migrates all your extensions, bookmarks, and preferences automatically, so there’s really nothing to lose. Also, on Windows at least, your profile is backed up when you install it, so there is no possibility of losing data from your Firefox 1.0.7 installation.

Update: Just for comparison, Firefox 1.5 RC1 starts with memory usage of about 34,000 KB. After a while, it quickly shoots up above 100,000 KB, which is just wrong. Photoshop, a way more powerful and feature-packed program, uses only 50 MB of memory at startup and usually doesn’t top 200 MB for me, though I only work with small, Web-ready graphics.

(Visitors from the CSS Reboot website should read this entry.)

After two months of hard work and 138 commits to my Subversion repository, Langosta 1.2.0 is finally complete. The final version is comprised of 12,300 lines of my own code and over 13,000 lines of library code, images (dunno if my script counts binary lines or not), and other files.

The following major enhancements are planned for the 1.3 release (January 1, 2006):

Full AJAXification

AJAX will be applied to comment and entry posting, searching, all kinds of stuff.

Database Session Storage

User sessions will be stored in the database using a custom handler rather than PHP’s session handler; this will allow for neat things like showing how many users are logged in at any given time.

Data Object Caching

This is something that has already been added to a certain extent to Langosta 1.2. In 1.3, more data will be cached and I’ll investigate new ways to cache things, like in PHP’s shared memory or in a MySQL heap (shared memory) table.

Blog Sidebar Calendar

For those who remember the calendar from Langosta 0.4, this is what it will look like. The calendar will probably replace the “Archives by Month” section.

Slide-Out Sidebar Navigation

Sidebar navigation items will expand, showing a submenu of links

Autotagging

Entries will be auto-tagged with certain words depending on rules that the blogger has specified and on the number of occurrences of the word in a single entry.

Ajax Searching on the Sidebar

Users will be able to type a phrase into a box on the sidebar and have their search results appear without a reload, similar to Google Suggest. The search engine will also be used to handle 404 errors and will be capable of indexing just about any content found on this website.

Static Pages

Currently, static pages are simply extra views. These would be better off stored in the database where they can be indexed, searched, and given metadata or labels.

I know I said that I was done with Langosta-only posts, but I just had to say something. I plan on setting up a development copy of Langosta in a different directory sometime soon where you can view the blog with all of the 1.3 enhancements before it is released, but the main website will no longer be “bleeding edge.”