Trader’s Narrative

Yes, I’m back!

I truly appreciate all the comments and emails from the readers. I never knew this blog was so important to so many people. My apologies for leaving for such an extended vacation.

Although it may not satisfy everyone, as way of explanation, I took some time off to recharge the batteries, wrangle with a nasty Firefox upgrade, move to new servers, a spiffy new computer system… and managed to squeeze in some strutting on the beach… throwing up gang signs. You know. The usual.

The Mozilla Foundation and I have kissed and made-up - having quickly forgotten and forgiving my flagrant dalliance with that spurious vixen, Opera.

Look forward to not just a return to the market commentary and analysis but new, interesting and surprisingly useful tools. Stay tuned

There have been no updates for the past few days because I’ve been wrestling with my new browser and I’m extremely frustrated.

As “Papa Bear”, Bill O’Reilly might say if he were in my shoes, “F**king thing sucks! WE’LL DO IT LIVE!”

I’m frustrated, not just because I’ve been a loyal Firefox fan and supporter for a long time but also because I bought into the hype and downloaded the new version to help Mozilla set a new world record.

I just can’t believe an organization that has put out such high quality software in the past can jump the shark this badly. How many months was this in beta again? how many release candidates did we go through?

Here are the problems I’m having:

• pages won’t load!
• when they do, CSS is randomly missing
• if they do render, pages are very slow (my cursor stutters rather than glides across the page)
• the “awsome bar” is about as useful and interesting as Jar Jar Binks
• too many add-ons are not compatible

I headed over to the support forums and this is the page Firefox 3 presented me with (I kid you not):

And here is what google analytics looks like for me (click to enlarge):

I tried erasing the cache, cookies, etc. then restarting Firefox but no matter what I do, that is what Google Analytics looks like. I’ve heard from others that they can’t see Google Maps and others that MySpace (one of the most popular sites on the web) doesn’t render correctly.

Anyone else out there have problems with Firefox 3 or is it just me?

Oh and in case you’re wondering, I’m typing this from Opera (9.50).

Tomorrow Mozilla will release a big version update for the Firefox browser.

I don’t know what I would do if I surfed the web with any other browser! It is fast, easy to use, chock full of features and has myriad extensions that add serious functionality.

I use the following extensions: Sage, Talkback, NoScript, DOM Inspector, SE Ordering, Greasemonkey, Download Statusbar, Fasterfox, Web Developer, FireFTP, ColorZilla, delicious, and Cooliris Previews.

I really hope they’ve plugged the pesky memory leak in this update. That’s my only gripe with Firefox.

Two curious facts about Mozilla Firefox:

• That little Google search box on the upper right corner of the browser earns the Mozilla Foundation almost $10 million a year.
• Did you know a real animal exists by the name firefox? It is more commonly known as a red panda. Click here to watch one headbutting a Japanese girl (ala Zidane).