12 reasons why I still prefer Firefox for my daily browsing

I am a web developer. It is more precise to say that I am a front-end web developer. This means that I need developer console each and every day.

For years now Chrome's development tools have been much much better for me as a developer than what is available in Firefox. So I use Chrome (mostly) for development.

However I also have personal needs when browsing as well as professional, not related to coding. In this case I love what Firefox has to offer.

Here are   reasons why I prefer Firefox over Chrome for my browsing:

Unlimited tabs open without noticeable slow down. This is important for me, especially when I read my news feed, I tend to open all interesting articles and read them after I am done with the list. Often this means 30+ tabs.

Configurable tab opening behavior. Chrome was not able or not willing to implement that for years: I want my tabs to open in the background without me having to use the middle mouse button. Why? Well because most products (apps) use shortcuts there days and I love them. Even in Google Plus you can press "v" to open the linked article and in Firefox it goes to load in the background while in Chrome the browser switches to the newly opened tab and I have to wait and stare first at the blank page and after a while at the half rendered page and after that maybe read the article, but usually switch back to the original opener tab. There are plugins that try to handle that, but none of them works correctly.

Much faster start up. One thing Firefox learned to do is to load only the pinned tabs and the one that is focused when restoring a browsing session. This means that I can close my browser at any time and go back to it as it was without having to wait like 5 minutes for it to become responsive. On top of that even without many tabs Chrome starts much slower, on a few years old computer (core 2 duo with 4 gigs of ram) Chrome starts too slow (mainly because it tries to read so many things from the disk I think). Once it starts it is okay, but this means I have to keep it preloaded all the time for it to be as responsive on start up as Firefox. No thanks.

Omnibox completion. This one suck big time in Chrome. At the beginning Firefox used two inputs - one for the address (address bar) and one for the search (search bar). However for many years now one can just remove the search bar and use the address bar to search Google (or any other set as default search engine address). On top of that it uses your bookmarks, your history and your recent searches and it learns to be much more of help than what Chrome does. Chrome for example almost never uses my bookmarks to help my with the typing, it is limited to only 5 entries and usually most of them are Google suggestions. On top of that there is no easy way (panel or otherwise) to search your bookmarks quickly. Chrome has those "apps" installed that are just links, but they are not configurable. For example I use InoReader, but their 'app' icon uses http. I want to use https for the service, but even if I add it as a bookmark Chrome never completes it for me. I have to navigate my bookmarks and find it. Way to frustrating.

Pinned tabs. In Firefox you cannot accidentally close a pinned tab. In Chrome pinned tabs are not really pinned, they are just visually reduced to be as large as the faveicon.

Expose like functionality for sessions. Okay this is really interesting. With this one Firefox allows me to have several filled with tabs views into the same browser window. I had 3 and kept them there for months before I had the time to read all of them and the browser remembered them. In chrome I am forces to bookmark those and mark them as "read it later". But those should not really be bookmarks. Note that this cannot be simulated with several Chrome windows, because I cannot close all windows at once easily.

Often used web sites: Chrome and Firefox have the ability to display thumbnails of your most often visited web sites. What Firefox allows you to do on top of that is to pin your favorites and thus have quick access to the ones you think are most useful and not the ones you really visit most often. This is to say the tool is versatile and you can use it as you like, not as someone has decided for you.

Superior plugins. At this point I have only one in mind but it works much much much better in Firefox than anything close to functionality in Chrome - ScrapBook. In Firefox the extension uses nice side panel, has search and most importantly - saves your documents at configurable location. For example in your Dropbox folder. Chrome variants use indexedDB and cannot sync between several computer in no usable way. And this tool has proven to be so useful that I simply cannot forgo it.

Better support for themes. You can make Firefox look like Chrome. You cannot make Chrome look like Firefox.

You can force sync. In Firefox the sync button is exposed and you can force the sync. In Chrome if you make a change right before you close the browser it might not be populated to the server. This is especially bad in relation to the fact that a bookmark has to be used to mark a web page for later reading (see above).

Last tab closed behavior: In Firefox when you close a tab and it happen to be your last tab the browser does not exit, instead a new tab replaces it. This is also configurable. The problem is that I am just closing a page, I do not have to pay attention if it is the last one in the window. This is very irritating especially when combined with the slow "fresh" start of the Chrome (see above).

AdBlock(+): This almost never work as intended on Chrome. Maybe it is developers problem, not necessarily a browser problem, but still as an end user it irritates me.


If I think hard enough I can come up with several other reasons, but I think this suffice to say that I am a bit on the 'advanced' user side. Chrome appeals much more to those that do not rely so much on their browser to comfort their browsing for whole days/nights. I know people that use it very happily, do not have even a single bookmark and most often do not even know which browser they are using. This is all fine as well and I know Firefox is not for everyone, neither is Chrome

What I miss from Chrome when using Firefox?

As much as I love Firefox there are aspects of Chrome that I like and miss when using Firefox. A list follows that describes the most missed features.

Open as window app. Using the 'app' icon you can configure a URL to open in a new window as a separate app. It is especially useful for apps that do not use popup windows and are examples of the so called fat clients or rich apps: Gmail, InoReader, Youtube (especially now that it does not reload the page) etc. The window manager picks up the face icon as application icon and you have somewhat more real application on your desktop.

Task manager: Sometimes while browsing I notice that my fan goes on and on at the highest speed. Chrome allows me to see the CPU.Mem usage of each separate tab. Well, this is not entirely true, it shows me tabs grouped by processes, which is not the same as being per tab but never the less it allows me to narrow down the offender. On top of that it can give useful information from developer's point of view.

Offline apps with escalated privileges. I do not use one in particular that cannot be implemented well with IndexedDB and AppCache (that is to require access to hardware outside of the standard web APIs) but still it is good to know that it is there if you need it.

Chrome makes features available faster than Firefox. Such example is Speech synthesis and recognition, File API etc, things Firefox users have to wait for much longer.

Chrome has more horse power when it comes to raw JS performance: For most apps JS runs smooth on both browsers, but computation intensive apps tend to be more responsive in Chrome. One such example is Google spreadsheet. I have spreadsheets with thousands of records and tens of sheets and thousands of formulas and those run around 20% faster on Chrome. I am not sure if it is because off the browser or because they were fine tuned for Chrome but it is the fact.

This is again not all, but what comes at the top of my head, the features I miss the most on my day to day browsing.

I am really pro-Firefox for several ideological reasons as well, but I am not too optimistic for its future. They as a company have dedicated too much effort in Firefox OS, a project that is born dead in my eyes. On the other hand Google uses Chrome to make it possible to create apps that run fully offline on the desktop and on the mobile (packaged apps) and eventually this will make them a leader as a target platform for development while Firefox will remain marginal "proof of concept" platform with no adoption outside the geek community and is essentially waste of time and money. I know that Mozilla is non-profit, but making useful things for the users is IMO more productive than to make a very limited-use OS.

The problem with on-line apps

Okay, I have to admin on-line web apps are absolutely great. You can use any computer and if you remember your password you can use the tool from anywhere in the world, you don't have to bring your own laptop, you don't have to worry about backups and disk failures and you are always using the latest and greatest version of the software. Isn't it great!


Well, it is great for as long as it lasts....


One after another companies and start-up fail or are being bought and/or merges with another (mostly commercial) product and with a little to no notice are being closed down. And it happens very often, more often than you might imagine.

Lets take Google reader for example. What a great service it was. And it closed down, regardless of the protests, regardless of the on-line groups opposing it. Vuru - financials service also closes now with only a month notice. Half of the applications I have ever installed in Chrome do no longer exist. Half! And the other half are giants like Facebook, Google mail etc. And even they can decide to close down at any given moment. As soon as they decide that it is no longer relevant or profitable there is nothing from stopping the company from closing down the doors and windows and there is no way you can argue with that.

So what does that mean for you? Lets imagine this: You have worked for several days, maybe even weeks creating the ultimate application in Google Spreadsheets. It is NOT portable, because you used all the excellent services provided in the scripting environment so basically your sheets are useless outside of  this company's environment.

But Google is almighty and great, they will not close down. Oh but they will, sooner or later they will shut down services that are not profitable for them. And then what?

I will tell you what - you re on your own. Currently there is no way to write those scripts portable so that they will work with any other known environment. I have data collection and analysis tool written for Google spreadsheet application spawning 24 files. It is working very well indeed and it is hosted for free for me etc. But what will happen when Google decides that the new - improved by the way - spreadsheet application drops some of the services support. Like they actually did? Can you stay on an older version so all your stuff will continue to work? No! Can you take your application elsewhere. No! Can you do something about it? No.....

So next time you agree to fully rely on a free or paid on-line web application remember this - you have absolutely no control over your data. And even if this is not a problem for you think this: you have absolutely no control over the software. And if this is also not bothering you - you have no control on the availability of this software. It can disappear  in just an instance!

I for one am thinking about it. The problem is this: 6-7 years ago when Google started this "the web is the platform" bullshit it sounded like the end of an era - every one can put their application on-line and reach any user on any device and perform outstandingly business-wise. Yeah... and now every and each one of those excellent performers hold you in a grip firmer than any of those other before them. Yes, I am talking Microsoft. The "evil" they was / are, they would NEVER make you loose your application. You had a choice. Stay with the older version and protect yourself the ways you can (Intranet, firewalls, whatever) or upgrade and pay anew once again becoming master of your applications. Now this choice is gone and you are completely at the mercy of those companies. Think about that. You do not own anything. Your data, your software or its availability. You control nothing and have no rights.

So congratulations to you all on-line service and apps users. You have been schemed out of your digital hold o things. What will happen next? Who knows. But the next time someone starts to praise to me the advantages of the cloud and web apps I might just kick him hard.

Rss for personal use

After Google reader have been shut down in July I migrated first to Feedly and ten to InoReader.

Ino is very good if you can get used to some limitations.

Lately I have been reading more and more on privacy concerns and it turned out that all those on-line services have one or more issues when it comes to your privacy. Basically they can do whatever they want with the statistical data collected based on your usage and interests under one form on another.

I can understand why for some people this is not a big concern, however there are also people who strongly disagree with this policy.

I tend to be neutral on it, but just for the sake of the argument I decided to try and go on the other side and see if I can set up a local solution for RSS reading.

Now, it is clear to me that large percentage of the younger population prefer to get their news pre-filtered by their peers (via facebook, tweeter and g+ for example), but I still have several very different interest and no particular person(s) to count on for providing me enough information on all topics that might interest me, so I use RSS news feeds daily.

Quick look up for free Linux solutions for RSS reading reveal that most of those are console based and are not very useful if your feeds contain lots of media (pictures, embedded audio and/or videos) so I decided to go with liferea.

Now, one interesting aspect of liferea is that it can sync with those on-line services you know already (like Feedly and InoReader). However the objective is to be independent of those.

So what you do is basically export your feed list from the service provider and import it in liferea.

Liferea keeps all its data in .liferea_1.8 in your home directory so it is easy to set this up as a symlink and actually use portable media to store your data and take with you. Note that you should actually use fast flash drive as the low end devices are too slow and will result in bad user experience is used.

I think same could be done for your .firefox folder. Even thou Mozilla says it protects your data and encrypts it, Google definitely does look at your usage. Chrome is a very good browser, but I do not feel comfortable using it for my day to day browsing so I use it primarily for development.

As a developer I like the idea for the open web, but as a business trained mind I can clearly understand that those "free" services has to operate on something and that 99% of the users do not actually pay for the premium features so it is very hard to stay afloat with only free riding users so it is only natural to try and capitalize on the user statistics. This is why I think that most services must be pay-walled. If you pay you have the right to demand conditions. If you do not want to pay just use other personal solutions. Free services should die.

And if this means RSS might die, so be it.

Component goodness (Polymer) - (with update on readiness)

After several months of active development I think Polymer deserves another trial / deep look.

My initial reactions to it was negative due to several assumptions I had:

• there is no way to compile down to one file
• there is no 'global compile-time checking'

It seems my first objection is now being addressed and there will be a way to compile down all the imports and links into one single file, which is great. The second one is hard to explain if you are not used to Dart or Closure ways of doing things, but basically they make compile time graph of all your calls and compile an AST of your application and operate on it (checks, asserts, rewrites etc). The thing is that you should not really need that if you use the declarative approach to build your application, which is what Polymer assumes you are trying to do.

So how do we do this?

First go get the code. I used c9.io workspace, but if you have a Linux/MacOSX machine you can do this locally. I tried all the methods: zip archive, git pull and bower - all of them work, but some of the examples need path tweaking to find the files. Also you might need to add both polymer.js and platform.js if non-minified version is used (bower and git).

I find that one of the most interesting tests one can do with a new technology is to try and build something complex that you have already built with another technology. Then compare the result, the experience and the speed of development between the two approaches.

My intent is to use Longa as a product developed with Closure tools and to try to re-create it with Polymer.

Longa is a large product (~2MB unprocessed JS and templates). Compiled with closure compiler it is boiled down to 115KB (JS plus the templates) and is further compressed by the server to 30KB, which makes a reasonable download size for a mobile web application. 

The HTML cannot be compiled down (names matter, its not like JavaScript), thus the savings should be coming from a more compact expression forms. 

For now I have re-created only a single channel record and I could say I am already impressed with what the platform is capable of doing without actually me needing to write any code at all. Of course there is much to be done and even more to be desired.

For example the styling of two shadowed elements do not work as I was expecting (in the context of a single polymer element and the elements are regular ones - a div and an image tag). Maybe it is a bug, maybe I am missing something, but still it is kind of a hurdle for a new comer, regardless of how many tutorials are out there, pretty much all of them concentrate their efforts on the area of isolating the styles from the outside world and not on how they work internally.

One of the most interesting things I notices was the fact that you can bind the styling of an element and mix it with an expression, so an element can calculate style values based on properties and arithmetics. For example:

#selector { height: {{height+20}}px; }

is a valid style inside the template of an element!

Another interesting factor is the abstraction of complex routines into elements. For example ajax calls are hidden in an element and you can listen on that element or any of its parents and use it as a regular element (just like the select or change events in native controls).

All in all it is at least an interesting toy. I am not sure how fast the browsers will get to the point where all this will work without hacks or shims, but at least for a certain class of applications it will be a nice fresh breath out of the JS insanity we have been living with for the last 10 years. 

As a conclusion: even if your code is very complex (for example something like a drawing board or document viewer) you can at least try and ship it as a web component so others can use it in the simplest form possible, by just import it and use it as a tag in their markup. I for one will try that!

Update (12/16/2013): Turns out most of the things do not work in FF/Mobile Safari, especially the styling. Some style rules do not work in Chrome even with no apparent reason. For example rule like this:

padding-left: 4px;

does not work but this one does:

padding: 0 0 0 4px;

I guess there are still lots of bugs and features missing, but clearly if you want to just tap your fingers into the power of the web components now is a suitable time. However if you want to go to full blown large apps you should definitely wait at least a few months! 

HP Chromebook 11 - developer's review.

Ever since the inception of the Chromebook project I have been a huge fan.

I envied the attendees who got the cr48 one. Then I was furious that the Samsung ARM one was not available (or any of the other ones as a matter of fact) in my country. I have travelled, but never got the chance to see one or wait long enough for a deliver on any given place.

Finally few weeks ago when the new HP Chromebooks have been announced I decided it is time to purchase one of those.

A little bit about my love-hate history with the 'new laptop' purchases.

I have an old Thinkpad X61s. Purchased 6 years ago when it was brand new it costed a lot! Really big money for the time. But I loved it. I has always been running with Linux and even thou I had to manually install a script every time I reinstall (every 18 months or so) it worked great.

A year and a half back I realised it was maybe the time to upgrade. So I went hunting for a new laptop.

This is the place to say that I do web development for living. Mainly front-end development (CSS, HTML, JavaScript). Modern front end development also requires you to run Node js, Java, GNU Make, Bash, Python and a series of other more obscure tools. They are not part of the final product but greatly reduce the work load and provide assistance which is invaluable for modern development practices. Linux fits here in the middle. Lots of tools work best with OSX, like Casper etc, but is much better than Windows.

Naturally I went first with Thinkpad again - Edge 340 (or something like that, sorry don't really remember the numbering - core i5, 4GB, 120GB HDD, 11 inches wide, glossy display, built in camera). Well the problem with that laptop was it was way too hot to tolerate on my lap. And the fan never ever stopped even on Windows, let alone on Linux. So I returned it.

Then the next choice was Apple - MacBook Air 11 inches. I have to say it was a very well built machine. It only goes hot when watching flash videos in full screen. And then there was OSX. Well, there is the menu bar always on top - stealing precious 25 pixels from a very short 768 pixels. And then there was Chrome not being able to make plugins go full screen (so when you go to apple trailers you have to watch them as small as they come). And then there was the fact that lots of tools had to be managed/installed from different sources manually. At least in Linux there is one general command to manage all software. I have been with it for 2 weeks and then I returned it. Some say I should have given it more time. Sometimes I think that too, but then I remember what I had to put up with all the time for the smallest things and I do not intend to to back to OSX any time soon.

To sum up I am a web developer who is fed up with badly designed hardware and software that was not fitting my expectations.

And then there was ChromeOS. I decided to try and live off the Chrome browser (on Linux) for a month and see how it goes.

I uploaded my pictures to G+ and my videos to YouTube, my pdf and manuals to Drive and my docs and spreadsheets to Docs. My music did not fit in anywhere, but I was listening more and more off my phone so it was not such a big deal. I moved my development environment to Cloud9 and what I was not able to move there I accessed 'live' with sftp mounts. (Well I was not aware that sftp mounts are not allowed in ChromeOS which sucks).

The experiment went for like a month and I was sure I can live with the Chrome browser. I still have my work PC at the office if I needed to test Firefox or IE compatibility.

I was thinking a lot which Chromebook to purchase. At the end I just wanted a silent machine and the one without a fan seemed just the right choice. I was aware that it might get slow with more than 5 - 6 tabs, but it was okay, I just need to make some adjustments to my browsing - that's what I told myself.

So I went and purchased the HP Chromebook 11 - ARM.

First I needed to wait for the availability. Then I needed to wait for the delivery. Then for the delivery from UK to Bulgaria. It costed me almost as much as a regular netbook (around 300 Euro). But it finally got here.

I had to wait (a lot) for the initial update, but after that it was fine. For viewing my email and G+.

And then I tried watching a movie from my thumb drive. H264 (480p) plays just fine. Excellent actually. Xvid is really bad (read SLOWWW). I haven't tried anything else yet, but I think h264 is okay. For now.

And this morning the shit hit the fan. I like to watch tech videos on YouTube at 1.5 speed. So naturally I went and enabled html5 player. And then it stopped working. Like at ALL! I was no more able to rewind in the videos. If I do it stops playing and it never comes back. Even after refresh. Even after restart. So I go back and opt out of the html5. But guess what - even if it says you are served the flash player you still get the html5 one. Even after clearing all caches. Even after resetting the browser. Even after deleting all the cookies. Even after powerwash. Even in incognito mode. Even in guest mode. So basically you are stuck with html5 play back which is terrible on this laptop.

After advice from G+ community I installed an extension that half resolved the problem. Now the video starts loading and then the extension kicks in and reloads the video this time with the flash player. Great! So after pushing for years now for html5 it does not work on the machine that they have designed? The big shots have more important things to do I guess.

So I went about my day and logged in c9 to do some work. Yeah, not so fast! c9 uses socket to communicate. And the HP11 decided to drop the connection every few minutes. Even when on the same network with the Thinkpad which never drops it. Even when left alone in the network with the router. Even after powerwash. Ha! So basically the terminal restarts every few minutes. And youtube videos stop every few minutes. And it is not the network and it is not the router. So it IS the HP11.

At this point I doubt that it could be used for anything more than to rant about it on the Internet. That one is does great. It is actually so bad that half of my spreadsheets do not work (actually they do, but after one makes a change it starts auto save and no new changes are reflected in the UI until a successful save and the saves take 1-2 minutes. Yes, MINUTES!

This reminds me of a toy that is sold currently - an imitation of a laptop which plays some music and displays some text to teach the kid the alphabet. Anyone looking to buy such a toy please feel free to contact me - I have one for sale and as a bonus you can also (try to) watch your porn on it.

In the scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the best laptop, HP11 is a 2. One point for being completely cool. Half point for being shiny good looking and half for the good display. Everything else about it is grossly unbearable and should never ever be sold to customers.

Important notice: It is NOT the software. I have lived with Chrome-only environment for the last month and everything was great. But it is great when run on a normal hardware. When run on something like the HP11 where the wifi is unreliable and youtube seem to be hated it turns into a nightmare. Developing in the cloud is absolutely impossible (if you want to stay sane). And you can never install anything locally, remember?

So two options left: sell it or try to run Ubuntu on it. About that - only 4 GB left free. How come from 16GB? What do those people put on this machine? I have Linux installs with 10GB only root filesystem and with all possible software (including build tool-chains, java, gimp, open office and lots and lots of other software it never goes beyond 7GB. How come ChromeOS already ate 12 GB?!?!? Its a mystery!!

When I get back to the city I will try it again. And if it fails me again I will just sell it. Too expensive to return it.

I have no problem parting with it. The problem is what will I get instead of it. I cannot live with Windows. And I certainly do not want OSX. But Linux is becoming weaker and weaker with every year. ChromeOS seemed like a nice fit, but evidently that still need to figure out the hardware policies. Because I am not paying 1300 USD nor putting up with a half usable laptop.

Frameworkless JavaScript (or how we reinvented the wheel)

So the quality of the articles is doomed to decline once you get enough subscribers, I notice that. Last example is "JavaScript Weekly". How and why I cannot still comprehend, but it is a fact. In this weeks edition a ridiculous post was shared with the subscribers written by Tero Piirainen. In short (if you do not want to waste time reading it all) he claims that they do not use library (A, B or C) because it introduces:

1. large code size (to be downloaded)
2. abstractions (really? abstractions over websocket, that actually transfers JSON only??)
3. hard to comprehend large code base

So basically he advises us to reinvent the wheel every time we start  anew project. So to have clean slate and think only about the API. Hah....

Dear Tero, smart people years ago had the same problem you have today. And smart people tend to resolve the problems (well) in a smart way. Years ago Google open sources their set of tools called Closure Tools. It attempts (and succeeds) to solve all those problems that you are fighting like a real Don Quixo without ever looking into alternative solutions. Of course lots and lots of people did not understand how to use the library and the compiler back then and still do not understand it today. One such example is here (really stupid article about micro optimization and the lack of understanding what does the compiler do to such "slow" code). For those who are not into masochism the tools make what you want without you reinventing the wheel each time: tree shaking, minification, method extraction (i.e. shortening/removing the prototype chain lookups), reduce/remove or namespace nesting, method in-lining,  modules (lazy loads) and more (like pre-calculating values etc). Yes - it is kind of hard to wrap one's head around it, but it does brilliant job and in my experience it reduces code from several megabytes to 30-40KB gzipped. 

I do not say it is the perfect solution, but it does a very good job. Today it is still actively developed at Google and is actively used in large number of their user facing product. This about that for a second: one of the largest web companies, a company that is very inclined to make the web fast, is using those tools to make smaller, faster loading, faster running applications!

And yes, backbone plus underscore plus whatever templates is the mainstream way of doing things these days. But no, this is not the way to go when you want large scale but small applications.

After Google Reader

It is somewhat in fashion to name things starting with 'After'. After Eart, After etc.

However this post is about the now dead Google reader and what happened after that.

At first it looked like feedly will be the winner - they already had integration with google accounts, it was very easy to use your feeds and while lots lacked behind on the UX side of things, they provded a working solution for the problem somewhat 1 mln users were facing.

After a week long testing I migrated (almost a full month before reader was closed down). The day it happened feedly had some issues but none the less it worked well. The problem was its creators had UI vision very different from what Google engeneers used to have when reader was last updated. Hovering to activate the side panel, really? No way to go to topics, only a few, very basic shortcuts... there was so much missing it bearly scratched the needs of the power users. And then it was an extention, not a real cloud app. But they fixed that...

If you are like me you read several houndred titles a day, mostly skimming for something that might be of interest or importantce. This was not supported at all initially, then they aded somewhat handicaped version of it (calling it "classic google reader look". Well ... no.

There was no search. Later they decided that search will be behind a paywall. Great, so now we are supposed to just pay for search results? It ain't gonna happen, considering the fact that the same content is available online and indexed already by google's search egngine. Sorry fellas, wrong decision.

If that was the end of the story it would have been a bit traggic: users end up with half working (several times I had to contact support because titles I have read kept coming up as new ones!), half familiar, worse product than what tehy are used to.

But then, I don't eve remember how, I found InoReader. Gess what, it has the exact same shortcuts as Google reader, it looks pretty much the same (it's an option) and behaves the same. It contains the statistics for your feeds, also in a newtly arranged UI box it shows the status of your subscriptions so you can see if one or more had stopped working and it loads FAST. I mean really really fast! I cannot compare it to GR, because it is gone already, but it is much faster than feedly that is for sure! It reacts to user input faster and behaves smoother.

If you are like me and happen to miss Google Reader just give it a try! I promess at least as UX it wont dissapoint. I am not sure how well the backend is constructed, but front end wise it is the best out there, maybe even better than GR!

Closure tools development in the cloud

I have been waiting for this for some time now!

Probably this happened some time ago, but I found out just today that it is now possible to use cloud9 ide on a complete shared environment, which means I have a terminal, python and java runtimes and I can finally develop using complete closure tools in the cloud! I just had to copy over my setup from a local folder to the hosted environment and it just worked.

Well not "just", because they run an older version of python (2.6), but it is pretty easy to overcome this.

The finding was part of my ongoing investigation for an article on using Chomebook as a primary laptop for the modern web developer. Of course my work flow is already skewed enough by my decade and a half living with GNU/Linux, but even I find it frustrating to constantly have to "update" and "distro-upgrade". The last piece missing will probably be the hardest to figure out, but I have one last trick up my sleeve.

If it all goes well and sound I would be buying my next laptop from Google. If not, well, I would be still buying a laptop with Chrome OS but it would be the cheapest one (Samsung S3) and will use it only for light reading.

Tip: I know that the Samsung can be used for development as well, because all the compilation and checks are run on the server, however because it has only 2GB of RAM it would be hard to open many "applications" on it and I am not sure how usable it would be for devs.

Как лесно да следим инвестициите си в ДФ (с google spreadsheet)

Увод

След като държавата прецени, че българинът разполага с предостатъчно средства и е време за нов данък, който стана актуален от началото на 2013 година (интересното при него е че стана ретроактивен, което попари доста спестяващи български семейства като им жулна данък върху депозит направен много преди да се заговори за това, например 2 или 3 години по-рано), нормално беше хората със спестявания да потърсят алтернативен начин за вложение на парите си така че поне да се преборят с инфлацията. Единият вариант бяха така наречените безсрочни депозити, а другият (за малко по-авантюристичните) дяловото участие в доверени фондове.

Тази статия цели да помогне на не-специалистите да следят и измерват по-лесно инвестицията си в ДФ.

Изложение

Пресполагаме че вече сме си избрали ДФ където искаме да закупим дялове. Ако още не сте си избрали фонд, българският финансов пътеводител е добър старт.

Най-лесният вариант да следим движението според мен е google spreadsheet.

За да разработим пример ще използваме един от фондовете на UBBAM.

Избираме си фонд и проследяваме адреса на който се визуализира в табличен вид информацията за ценните. В случаят с "Патримониум Земя" адресът  се генерира автоматично от JavaScript и се състои от постоянен адрес и две променливи: начална дата и крайна дата.

http://www.ubbam.bg/libs/graphics.php?id=39&type=5&date_to=
&date_from=

За този пример ни е нужен само най-новия запис, за това ползваме следнтата формула за получаване на конкретен адрес:

=CONCATENATE("http://www.ubbam.bg/libs/graphics.php?id=39&type=5&date_to=",TEXT(TODAY(), "yyyy-MM-dd"),"&date_from=", TEXT(TODAY()-1, "yyyy-MM-dd"))

Така получаваме валиден адрес за зареждане на данни за цените на ДФ.

Следваща стъпка е да си направим импорт на тези данни: в гонрния край на таблицата ползваме функцията за импортиране на данни от web таблици:

=ImportHtml(B19, "table", 0)

където b19 е клетката в която сме получили адреса.

До тук имаме автоматично обновяване на данните за текущите цени и брой дялове на фонда при всяко отваряне на нашия документ.

Следваща стъпка е да въведем нашите покупки и формулите по които можем да изчисляваме показателите които не интересуват: текуща стойност на инвестицията ни, абсолютен растеж в проценти, относителен годишен растеж и т.н. Според конкретните инвестиционни цели структурите на формулите могат да се различават, но основното, което ни интересува е дали участието ни във фонда ни носи печалба и ако да дали тя е по-голяма от онова, което банките предлагат като лихвени проценти за срочните депозити.

Целият пример може да бъде видян тук.

Заключение

Участието в ДФ има своите плюсове и крие своите рискове, бъдете сигурни че сте се запознали добре с тях и за всеки случай отново прегледайте материалите на страниците на сайта "моите пари", където е подробно обяснено на български език всеки аспект на този вид инвестиции.

С помоща на малко познания от училище и малко компютърна грамотност е възможно да имаме лесен удобен и смислен достъп до данните за нашите пари инвестирани в ДФ.

What's wrong with Linux desktop

It is going to be a rant!

A few weeks back I was surprised to learn that Google has decided to stop supporting older versions of libc on Linux and thus the binaries you can download are incompatible with older Linux distro versions.

I still run Fedora 13 on my personal laptop and this was a clear signal that I am way behind end of life of the OS product. On the other hand I already know that I hate unity, mostly because task switching is awful hard and unintuitive. Basically they copy the OSX way of doing things: if you want to use Alt+Tab you end up switching applications and if an application has multiple windows you have to wait and perform a different set of instructions in order to be able to select a particular window. Well that's bad if you use multiple applications when working but some of them have multiple windows.

Let's make an example:

Google chrome for browsing and reading documentation/examples on the Internet.
Google chrome with different user for testing (without plugins)
Chome's debug tool as a separate window (or several of them)
Sublime text 2

Now, the problem is that I can no longer just use Alt+Tab, I have to construct a special mental model of how the environment is handling the windows and then perform some acrobatics with my fingers just to get to the window I need. This is waste of time and I installed gnome 2. It was still possible on ubuntu 12.04

Today I installed Fedora 18 (how many years later is that?).

You can imagine my surprise when I realised that Mutter is doing exactly the same stupid window selection thing as Unity!!!

Okay open source (shitheads) developers: I can understand that you LOOOOVVVEEE OSX and your child dream is to make a free UI that is better than mac's UI, but my question is this: of all the beautiful and awesome things OSX does (packaged apps anyone??!?!) how could you copy the worse EVER feature??

You might find it surprising bit this is the truth: Microsoft got it right! OSX is wring! Users want to change windows with Alt+Tab and tabs with Alt+1-9, no one wants to change "context" or "application" with ANYTHING, this is the most useless feature EVER!

The other most distasteful thing done in Gnome is the hard binding of the Windows key to whatever the stupid panorama view functionality is called. I want to change my keyboard layouts with the left windows key - the way I was doing it forever (I started using Linux in 1999 and ever since then I was using the freaking windows key to switch kbd layouts). Is it so hard to just make a key binding optional? It seems it is, if I need a whole application just to tell the freak show that gnome 3 is to use special keys for layout switching, because guess what, by default you need a real key to do it, just like an action trigger in an applications does, so basically Gnome3 is swallowing your applications' shortcuts!

Thanks a lot developers. You have ruined a perfectly well working desktop environment, and turned into mix of the worse decisions made in each and every OS out there.

On the bright side of things Xfce is working well enough. But there is still no support for remote servers (a la Nautilus) and this makes it impossible to use Thunar if you work in a networked environment and you need the remote files to look for all possible applications as local files.

Anyway, I think Gnome3 should die and all the developers that are working on it should be restricted from contributing to any software that has na UI for the rest of teir lifes.

There, I said it. I feel much better now.