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Thursday, November 14, 2002 |
November 11, 2002. Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There's leakage. Things go wrong. It happens all over the place when you have abstractions, and it's dragging us down. Read all about it in my latest feature article: The Law of Leaky Abstractions. An interesting read, overall. See how Joel comes to this conclusion:
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NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.2. Get it while it’s hot! No longer in beta. Changes since 1.0.1 include reduced bandwidth use, a Bandwidth Stats window, bug fixes, and user interface enhancements. [ranchero.com] NetNewsWire Lite is so hot! I could never obsess over so many weblogs without it. Set it about 80% transparent and to open web pages in the background, and I just don't know how it gets any better.
Well, actually, I do know. It gets better when NetNewsWire Pro is available, which will support posting to weblogs from NetNewsWire. |
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If you're like me, you've wanted to like Mozilla. You started using Netscape 0.9 or so, way back when. You were still relatively happy with it, when the Mozilla rewrite began. You respected the Open Source/hacker ethic underlying it. You felt dirty as you started using IE more and more, as you waited for Mozilla to emerge in a usable form. Nevertheless, you eventually got caught up using IE--pretty much all the time. Not just under Windows, but on your Mac, too. (IMHO, IE on the Mac had even more going for it than on Windows. The scrapbook and page holder features are still cool, and should be replicated.) You kept trying Mozilla and maybe even other alternatives such as Opera, iCab, and OmniWeb, but you kept on ending up back with IE. It was there. It was fast. More than anything, Mozilla just seemed a bit too Mozillaish. It didn't feel like a Windows program or a Mac program. Sure, it was supposed to be a platform, but couldn't look nice and have functioning accelerator keys, native-looking controls, etc. I won't even mention the bloat of having mail, news, and HTML editing built into the browser. (At least no more than I just did.) Well, relatively recently, two projects have delivered what I've found to be very compelling versions of the underlying Mozilla browser in the form of applications that feel very native on their respective OS platforms. On Windows (and Linux, though I haven't tried it there, yet), you have Phoenix. Phoenix is lean and mean. It is just a browser, and, IMHO, it is more than a match for IE. It is only in its 0.4 release, but I've found it more than ready for daily use--as long as you have a Windows or Linux box handy. As I don't have any Intel CPUs around the house, what I'm using these days is Chimera. Chimera is a native MacOS X Cocoa application that embeds the Gecko rendering engine. As of its current 0.6 release, Chimera seems ready for daily use, too. (I've even got my wife using it. Pop-up blocking sold it.) Interestingly, although Phoenix seems very native, it still uses XUL to create its UI. It just does a much better job than Mozilla and drops a bunch of non-browser code from Mozilla, along the way.
Both Phoenix and Chimera have the Mozilla features that I love the most: tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking. Both have customizable menu bars. Both are really excellent. Try one or both. |
Last update: 11/2/04; 6:04:16 PM .
