The Blog Of Dysfunction

The old man got me a new comp, E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache 2 GB Ram, 160 GB hard drive, intel DG31PR board etc. In short, its bloody fast. The only bad bit was to find and install all my old software which I had not made backups of. Thanks to a fast Internet connection and a log file of Belrac advisor which told me what my old comp had, I was all set up and ready in a day.

That was just unrelated showing off plus introduction, the matter at hand is that I have just finished test driving Firefox 2.0.0.13 [optimized and customized with updates plugins and add-on’s] and the latest Safari 3.1 for Windows. I first used safari last year when they released it as a beta and it was so disappointing that I never took a second look, till now, and boy am I glad I did. The Safari 3 beta of 2007 and the 3.1 of this year are in totally different leagues. Here are the scorecards

This comparison is for the average but aware web user whose main requirements are speed, stability, usability, and customizability.

Speed

Winner : Safari 3.1

Click on the picture for a bigger image

Page loading times were checked after clearing cache, history and cookies. The winner by a narrow margin is safari though image rich sites seem to load fastest in Firefox. In real life, such conditions are not always maintained and loading times are more or less equal with preserved cache and cookies.

Stability

Crashing

Winner: Safari 3.1

My firefox crashed once in its 6 hour long test with 24 tabs open. Safari became sluggish after about 20 tabs but did not experience any crashes.

System Usage

Pictures speak louder than words.

12 tabs open and active

24 tabs open each, both browsers minimized, Foobar playing “Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 23 in a Major, K. 488: Adagio”

Usability

Winner: Firefox

I found both browsers, from installation to customization to be about equally intuitive and user friendly. Keyboard short cuts, drag and drop, privacy, bookmark management are all more or less the same or equal in both browsers. The area in which Firefox has a definite edge over safari is in tabbed browsing management.The safari tab bar does not have the scrolling function that Firefox does and to view a tab after 16 tabs or so needs you to choose from a drop down list. To make it worse, you cannot close this tab easily as the tab is not made visible on the tab bar. Tabs beyond the 16th tab also cannot be dragged to a better position on the tab bar. Also if you are accustomed to the tab close button on the right side as in Firefox, you are inadvertently going to close a lot of tabs in your initial sessions with safari because its close button is on the left end of the tab.

Customizability

Winner: Firefox. Duh!!

Safari has, so to say, zero customizability, as all good add-on’s are terribly costly and most don’t work in windows. I cant even add a security plugin. In case you are un initiated, Firefox is the mother father and end of all customizable browsers. there is very little you cant get it to do with add-ons and scripts and I would, honest to God, be rather lost without its addons.

How did we manage before the advent of add-ons, I wonder.

Summary

What browser is best, is a question best answered based on the background and needs of the user as there is no “one size fits all” in the browser world. Are you a beginner,? just want tabbed browsing with speed and would much rather work with something right out of box, then safari 3.1 is a really good choice. On the other hand if you are a blogger, an above average Internet user and cannot bear the thought of life without customizability, Firefox is your shining knight on a mighty steed. If you are one of my girl-friends who just wants to check email and Orkut, use IE7, saves me the headache of downloading and installing a completely unappreciated software. If you are a mac user, you are stuck with safari and you shouldn’t be reading this anyway.

Me? If it isn’t obvious,

I LOVE FIREFOX

But I still use safari when I am not in my power user mode.

Ciao

Schizo

Technorati Tags: Firefox 2,safari 3.1,browser comparison

I was traveling by bus yesterday when I noticed a lot of big billboards of respectable jewelers and sari houses had pictures of cleavage flaunting ladies. I was under the impression that in the uber conservative Kerala they still censored all “unacceptable” display of feminine flesh. I am quiet sure that the last time I looked that was so. Well, the last time I looked was about nine years ago, I was in college, and my drunken friends were trying to rub the black paint off some unsuspecting film stars censured assets. Times have changed my younger friends tell me, they tell me that they cant remember a such a censored cleft save occasionally on the posters of the kind of movies “none of them watch” (Yah right).

Should I feel old and ignorant, for having woke up like kumbhakaran to a completely changed world, or just pity my poor young friends for they will never have the LMAO joy of watching drunken friends vent frustrations on black paint.

Ciao
Schizo

original image by mattlogelin

Note: Pardon my lack of resourcefulness of not being able to procure an offending billboard. I assure you efforts are underway to furnish all necessary evidence.

Tomorrow I leave Vellore, my home of seven long years. I leave behind best friends, memories and the naivety of youth.

Tomorrow I leave the well where I became a man.

Tomorrow I shall be happy.

Ciao

Schizo

photo by Lady Vervaine

Luke 17: ESV
Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan.Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

We had a bible study in church the other day and yours truly was spaced out as usual and dreaming about speaking at TED. Through my haze of pleasant clouds somehow some parts of this passage caught my attention.

The story is; Jesus was walking along minding Gods business one day when ten lepers find him and beg him to heal him, and heal he does, and asks them to go show themselves to the priest. One of these chaps instead of running to the priest comes back to thank Jesus, and that’s the main lesson of this story.

Jesus, to put it mildly, was rather weird. He was God and he was man, the creator and the created in one hominid package. He was weird because he was the only human being on the planet at that time who really understood all the “whys” of God. This is one of the reasons I guess a lot of people never really understood what he meant even if they obeyed what he said. This passage has such an all too familiar group, ten guys who have been miraculously healed, ebullient and obedient running to declare themselves restored into society, just as Jesus asked them to. Only one of them, the only one unschooled in the ways of Jehovah really understands what this man-god wanted.

The purpose of his healing was not just his restoration to normalcy or glory, but to realize that the most important thing is to glorify God. This leper disobeyed Christ and in doing so was healed wholly. He came back to worship because he understood that the god who heals is much more important than the priest who declares you healed.

Ciao

Schizo

The marvelous painting is by Brian Kershisnik

Tags: bible study

The ever triumphant, extraordinary Dr. Schizo has finally tinkered long enough and is satisfied with the glorious mod of a great theme. The newly modded chic-orientalis Misty look is on live display on the truly remarkable Blog of Dysfunction. The mod supports:

1. Increased width of the text area for better readability

2. A radically redesigned header area

3. A chic palette change

among other changes. Well. Pictures speak louder than words. Voila

Before:

After:

Thank You Sadish for Misty look.

Ciao

Schizo

Tags: Wordpress theme