That’s me! Look how happy I am! And look how shiny my coat is!
Seriously, I’m no longer thinking about ditching the Linux version of Firefox. Since I did my little experiment with installing and using the daily builds, I’m enjoying the quickness and light weight of the browser. I just uploaded some pics and updated FembotWiki, which showed me the biggest difference in speed I’ve seen yet this side of watching videos on YouTube.
I seriously used to hate watching YouTube videos on this computer. Any streaming video in fact would force me to look for applications to close and take my hand off the mouse even to let the CPU have all the cycles it needed to stagger through streaming and rendering the video in Firefox 3. Now with 3.6.2pre, it’s all good.
I just did a Google image search for Dolomite because I thought that 70s blaxploitation pimp would look good right here in this space. I didn’t find that because for some reason, there was a pic of Rihanna on the page… and now I’m looking at a whole schwack (metric terminology) of Rihanna pics.
Damn, what a stunning lady. It kind of sucks that she’s well known for being a punching bag. But as Bill Hicks said, “Chicks Dig Jerks“.
Back to the main topic of this post, which is Rihanna. It isn’t actually, but I feel like talking about it some more. Also, Bill Hicks was a better comedian than a singer. He was a decent guitar player though. I wish he wasn’t dead.
Here’s Chris Rock, speaking of comedians, checking out the lovely Rihanna. Have I mentioned that I’ve seen her described as a fembot a few times? That makes me like her even more. I think she’s a singer… or an actress. I don’t really care. I don’t listen to pop music anyway.
Actually, I do. I got one of those Pet Shop Boys CDs in the mail on Friday. Their first album, “Please” from 1986. But I’m not gay.
Anyway, what was I talking about originally… Oh yeah… Firefox. Yes, it’s much faster. I read about the huge speed boost that 3.5 brought, and the new technology that went into 3.6, which was a bigger change than the version number would relate. It’s made this computer here as fast and full featured as it’s ever been to use.
I even went so far as to install the daily build of Firefox on two other computers. One, a laptop, runs Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty” like this one. The other, my very first PC, runs Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy” The steps I listed in the post below only got me so far on those, however. On the other Jaunty machine, I had to remove the “Browser” icon from my LXDE panel (like the taskbar for all you Windows users who don’t know what I’m talking about) and add a direct link to the “firefox.desktop” file in usr/share/applications.
That works out better for me because then I can get the actual Firefox icon in my panel. Hooray.
The Hardy installation was a bit more problematic. I couldn’t run Firefox at all in any version after I had gone through those steps below. I’m actually quite pleased with my 1337 skillz that I managed to figure out how to fix that with the first thing I tried. I opened up Synaptic Package Manager and looked at my installed applications. There were Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.5 (actually 3.6.2pre) and all their dependencies. I simply checked the box to uninstall 3.0, which prompted Synaptic to automatically “upgrade” the remaining Firefox files, 3.5 and the dependencies.
Once that had completed, I swapped out the “Browser” icon that comes standard in the LXDE panel and replaced it with “Firefox”
And boom. Holy shit, can I ever see the difference in speed on that computer! Since I only use it for reading via text-to-speech, I can report that the reader starts faster and pauses less often. The computer has more memory now so everything runs faster. And the browser itself is much faster. I used to wait about 2 full seconds from opening a tab to being able to switch to it and see it update. Now it’s under 1 second, depending on the size of the page.
Who is still reading this… raise your hand.
Oh. Well, it was about time I shut up anyway. I wonder if Rihanna will ever appear in a video or some show as a fembot. I think that would be awesome.
