Café Kontra

Tech Break

Have a break, have a KitKat! Belated happy birthday! She's turned three last August 26. Isn't she cute? Yeah, even I'm not immune to gushing over children, sorry.

It's kinda funny posting a picture of her all smiley and whatnot, because she usually doesn't smile for photos at all, and instead stares at you with her mouth hanging slightly open. Honestly, this kid could stare you down bigtime. And her voice isn't high and tinny either. She has this huge, booming voice, and when she calls her brothers she knows she's boss. She's awesome that way.

Anyway, this wasn't what I was supposed to write about at all. What prompted this post was Mozilla's Ubiquity, which I found super-cool, and I just had to gush (yes, lots of gushing from me today. Hormones, perhaps). I titled the post 'Tech Break' because for once I was planning to (key word: planning) to take a break from writing self-involved posts and instead talk about cool nerdy things (again, not an oxymoron, dammit), like all the million and one tech-oriented blogs in this world do (sorry, the word blogosphere is a huge personal no-no). But then the first line wrote itself, and all was lost.

Yeah, anyway, Ubiquity. Pretty much anything Mozilla does every major tech blog writes about, and explanations are tedious anyway, so I won't bother (watch the video if you haven't yet, or honestly, just try it out, it's beyond awesome). It's an alpha, of course, but it's surprisingly usable.

I've been pretty much a fan of Firefox's customizability from the get-go, and until now it's the reason why I love the browser. Extensions that have extensions are particularly interesting to me intellectually, even if I don't use most of them (e.g. Greasemonkey and Stylish), which is why I like the way Ubiquity makes it easy to make custom commands. It's nice seeing Mozilla continuing being supremely extensible and developer-friendly, given that the approach has been a huge part of their success.

The first time an extension for Firefox really blew me away was when IETab came out. Admittedly, Firefox was young and everything was bright and shiny then. Still, admit it, you know what I'm talking about; it was like a huge 'wow' moment that that froze time when I discovered IETab. The killer was that it could open IE-only pages in a Firefox tab, automatically. I used it on my bank's site, among others (fortunately that bank has since decided to use non-IE-specific javascript). Nowadays everyone knows about it (aside from its usefulness, it became infamous for certain memory leaks), which has diminished the bling factor, but the fact remains that it was one of the reasons I stuck with Firefox. I doubt that I'm alone in that regard.

In the short time that has passed since I first 'discovered' IETab and now, technology has changed immensely, especially when it comes to the web. It's funny, though; in essence, most of it is just glorified text parsing (XML? Yeah. JSON? Yeah. Atom, RSS? What do you think? Microformats? Same thing), but the applications are staggering. Same thing with Ubiquity. It's all simple applications of existing technologies, but damn if it isn't useful.

posted by Jael @ 11:34 PM