About
When I was 46 I started writing essays on life, or the state of the human condition as I once called it. Because I was halfway between old enough to vote (21) and planned retirement (72) it was known as the "Halfway Point" series of essays.

Later when I mentioned the essays in one context or another on USENET, I got requests for copies and eventually for future essays. Thus the mailing list was born, and it moved to the Internet when that became widely available. At that time I moved to writing on a schedule, the 1st, 11th, and 21st of the month.

Now the trend is to "blogs," and read on demand. I am therefore making this available as a blog, and we shall see if people read it here, or by mail, or not at all.

My other writing
OddLinks - informal comments

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Firefox 4.0 beta - initial thoughts (13:04)

I just tried the new Firefox 4 beta, and I would say the Linux version is for power users only, due to install issues. It has a lot of features which are not easy to explore, and one of the most annoying demo videos I've used in ages.

The install

I initially tried to install on a Linux (FC13) 64 bit desktop, and found that there is no 64 bit Linux version. There's a 64 bit Windows version I bet, but I'm too lazy to install a 64 bit Windows VM to see. Since I didn't want to mess up my 64 bit system with bunches of 32 bit libraries, I started a 32 bit VM with Fedora 12 installed and used that. The install went quickly, and I was able to start the browser. Seems like Firefox, if I was a regular user I wouldn't find it much of a learning curve.

I noted that the browser supports HTML5, so I went to youtube to view some HTML5 content. Seems not to have any, or not to notice that your browser can support it, so I was stuck with flash. Flash didn't work. It told me I needed to install a plugin, which I told it to do. After much thrashing of disk and network, and entering the root password two or three times, it completed. Then it still wouldn't play flash. I restarted it, still would play flash. So I won't test it for normal business use, too many people put things in flash.

The video

There's a "see video" link, and clicking it got a video in some format the browser could play. A very video, indeed, the player started with the volume all the way up. Not nice to override my settings. After watching the commercial for testing the beta, I tried the "download in mpeg4" link. It does not download an mpeg4 version, it plays an mpeg4 version, again after turning the volume all the way up! At this point I was less than thrilled with the demo, and if they people setting it up didn't know the difference between dowload and view, clearly the developers were not in the loop with the marketing. The whole video tells how much they want beta user feedback, but...

Sending feedback

The link to report feedback gives you one line for your feedback. So my feedback was
    Problem #1: one line is not enough to report all the things I found
It doesn't wrap, after 100 characters or so it stops listening. Don't want people wasting our time with telling us how to reproduce the problem, do we?

Overall

I couldn't find a site with any of the new video formats it supports, I thought youtube detected HTML5 capability, but it just kept trying Flash. The install of flash didn't work and I am not overly interested in spending a lot of time to find out why, the libraries needed to play flash work fine with the old Firefox, I'm not clear why they didn't just work with the beta. If the install of Flash happened at all, it reset the mtime and ctime so "find" didn't identify it.

The things I did seemed fast and solid, I tried a few sites which have been a challenge, and they all worked fine as long as they didn't need flash. As usual the conflict between Adobe and people who have other formats only hurts the user. Rather choice we are left with the need to make all the conflicting formats work because we have to use them with customers or suppliers.