Firefox & Google

[robinturner]

Today I gave a short presentation on getting the most out of Firefox and Google, in which I tried to cram two subjects that could happily fill a week-long course into twenty minutes. In case anyone's interested, my notes are here.

Comments

[evan.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, ~ only triggers the "old" synonyms system, which is much fuzzier. The new synonyms system triggers implicitly (e.g. search for "prop 8" and you get "proposition 8") can be turned off by putting a + before a word. Yes, that UI is confusing.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I've amended the document. I suspected something was up when I was giving the workshop and typed

I eat 1..10 * every day

to find that Google very cleverly included sentences like "I will eat three apples every day" (though that could also be because Google normally ignores "I").

[solri.livejournal.com]

It was the latter: typing "+I eat 1..10 * every day" removed the future tense. Oh well I'm sure that some day Google will be able to substitute tenses.

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

Great stuff - but how about AdBlock Plus?

And you really should get into Google Docs, it's the bees knees.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I used AdBlock for a while when I was on dialup, but to be honest, ads on the Internet don't bother me that much. There again, that's only since I got a fast, free connection - if I were paying for all those slow, crappy bits of flash and java to download, then yes, I'd definitely start using it again.

Have you tried Chrome?

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

News: I was finally able to retire my 300MHz/Win98SE ToughBook, blessed brick that it is.

Running a nifty new Dell 1525 with *sigh* Vista.
It seems to hate Firefox.
I've had far more "FF is not responding" than ever before. Even w/300MHz and 128Meg RAM.
This sled is 3Gig / dual-core.

Seems very suspicious to me.

Re: Have you tried Chrome?

[solri.livejournal.com]

I haven't tried chrome because

- I hear it's very buggy (though fast);
- much as I like a lot of Google's stuff, I'm not sure I want them dominating the browser market as well, so I'm kind of hoping Chrome will fail;
- there isn't a Linux version yet.

Re: Have you tried Chrome?

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

Haven't encountered bugginess (only use it now and again, for fun more than productivity) ... and *sigh* I'm getting tired of fighting hegemony. More than tired: losing my edge ... and that ain't mere histrionics.

Ah, Linux ... I'm still waiting to have a box I can use for that. My ToughBook is sooooo stable with Win98SE I'm going to let it rest.

cheers