Irony

In the sense of "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs":

Firefox seems to run Google's Gmail better -- much better, in fact -- than Google's own browser, Chrome. At least in Linux.

The site loads faster. When you click something, whatever is supposed to happen happens faster. When you choose to "send from" a secondary email address and hit BCC, the bug that just goes back to address selection, requiring you to do it again, doesn't seem to exist. And when you paste a metric shit ton of addresses into the BCC field, it takes single-digit, rather than double-digit, seconds to process.

The experimental change from Chrome to Firefox is looking more and more like a permanent thing. I did have to figure out how to create the visible tab separators that Mozilla, for some insane reason, got rid of (that involved creating and populating a CSS file), but for the most part things are going swimmingly.

I'll know for sure after Monday morning, when I'll publish the first daily email edition of RRND since maybe 2008, that hasn't involved Chrome. The only thing Chrome had that I would have missed vis a vis my daily work requirements was the ability to use the Caret text editor Chrome app ... and Google, in its wisdom, recently decided to not allow those apps to work in Linux, meaning I'd already changed over to Geany anyway.

Adventures in Browser Organization: Symbaloo

Since my forcible repatriation from Chrome to Firefox (I've tried everything, including multiple nukings/reinstallations, and Chrome just won't run correctly any more), I've been looking for a replacement for NewsSquares, the one Chrome extension which had most revolutionized my daily browsing routine.

I haven't found anything quite as useful yet, but this LifeHacker article on useful start pages by Whitson Gordon turned me on to Symbaloo.

No, Symbaloo doesn't do everything that NewsSquares does (integrate with Google Reader, let me preview articles and keep track of read/unread stuff, etc.). Not even close. But it does at least let me organize my "daily routine" URLs into pretty clickable squares that open in new tabs. It also has some nice built-in news tracking features. Both of those things are big time-savers in my 100+ site daily grind.

Symbaloo is also web-based and browser-independent, so I don't lose it if I switch to Safari, Camino, Opera, or even eventually back to Chrome. That's obviously a major plus.

Here's hoping that Symbaloo steps up its game and adds NewsSquares-like features, or that Rocket-in-Bottle or some eager beaver clones NewsSquares as a Firefox add-on, or better yet a web-based, browser-independent hangamajigger.