Operafying firefox

After using Opera as my main web browser for about a year I decided to move back to Firefox, my reasons being:

1. Google toolbar for Opera doesn't support bookmarks.
2. I wanted to try add-ins such as PicLens.
   
3. Some key sites don't work correctly in Opera (internet banking, twiki passwords aren't remembered).
   
4. Opera doesn't handle multiple usernames for login forms well.
   

I missed a few features and the faster startup of Opera. There's not much I can do about the latter, but with a few add-ons much of the functionality that I found useful in Opera could be restored.

Both Fast Dial and Speed Dial offer much of the functionality seen in Opera's speed dial. I chose Fast Dial over Speed Dial mainly because it seems to get more frequent updates and is in a more mature state of development.
You can set Fast Dial to appear on a new tab. It is missing the search box when compared to Opera speed dial, but Firefox supports a search box in the toolbar, or google toolbar.

ImgLikeOpera adds a button to the right of the status bar that will allow you to toggle image loading between on, cached, this site only and off. It also allows you to specify default behaviour for a window or tab, and this can optionally be set to use the current tab/window settings if you have modified them which makes for a confusing settings option but is a useful feature missing from Opera.

There are a few add-ons that can restore the state of your windows and after trying them all I found that Session Manager works the best for me. You can tell it to automatically restore the state that your windows and tabs were in when you closed firefox and it also tries to recover a session after a crash, although I do find the dialog that comes up in this situation somewhat lacking - it calls the pre-crash session the 'current session' and the session state at startup before the crash is called the 'previous session'. To my mind there is no current session as the session has not yet started, and the 'previous session' is the state of my windows before the crash. However this is a minor niggle and it is a very good add-on. It also suppports named sessions and remembers the most recently closed windows and tabs in case you close one by mistake.

I still miss the Ctrl-tab behaviour of firefox (like alt-tab on windows it switches between the tabs in most recently used order rather than tab order), but the other add-ons have covered 90% of Opera benefits for me.

Now I just have to give Safari 3.1 for Windows a go and see how that compares...

The past, present and future of file systems

An interesting (in a geeky way) exploration of the delights of various file systems, all the way from DECTape and CP/M through to ZFS with a very brief note on future directions.

Read article at ars technica.