Firefox 3 - So Close, Yet So Annoying

By Cyrris , 27th May 11:01 pm

In stark contrast to my usual fanatical following of each previous version, I decided not to bother going near any of the beta releases for Firefox 3 which have been successively released over the past few months. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago, with the unveiling of Release Candidate 1, that I bit the bullet and gave it a go. While the reviews I have read around the web have given it glowing praise so far, I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed.

The best analogy I can think of is the car I drive. Just a few months ago I was driving a 15 year old bomb. All sorts of things were wrong with it, and it was generally not a pleasant driving experience. Now I have a brand new automobile. Being new, it has everything I could possibly want in a car, and more. What this means though, is that the few niggling bugs which do exist (a couple of rattles, a scratch or two, and a slightly misaligned dash panel) drive me absolutely insane. It’s so close to being perfect, but just not quite there because of some really stupid minor issues.

This is why Firefox 3 RC1 makes me so frustrated, and unfortunately very few of the issues appear to be fixable before the full release.

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Wider Pastures - The Samsung 2253BW

By Cyrris , 3rd May 12:58 am

The past few years have seen me computing on a 17″ LCD from BenQ. It was priced reasonably and for the day it’s 8ms response time meant that it was a decent choice for gaming. Being a budget brand though, it had it’s fair share of problems - it’s viewing angles were terrible, the substandard contrast and colour reproduction meant the images were not fantastic, and most annoyingly for me was the incredibly uneven backlight.

As time progressed, I got used to the nuances of the BenQ, but at the same time I’ve grown more and more aware of the move to widescreen formats. Previously not very well supported by many games, this is now no longer the case. Seeing all of Blizzard’s StarCraft II demos in widescreen format, I knew I’d have to make sure I was able to play it that way by the time it was out. So, I got myself a new monitor.

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