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So it seems like Firefox is having problems and everyone has been complaining about it a lot. I sure hope they fix it quickly. It's crashing on me constantly when I indulge in my YouTube addiction, and it uses up an ever-increasing amount of memory. A lot of my friends are enjoying Opera, but I just can't bring myself to install a proprietary browser.

I decided to give KDE and Konqueror another shot. I'm actually pretty pleased with it. Although Konqueror doesn't support two of my favorite Web sites, GMail and YouTube, it is very stable and very snappy. Even better, it uses half as much memory. It has a menu option to open the current page in Firefox, which is helpful for the times it doesn't work. This matches what a lot of Mac users do: they use a mix of Firefox and Safari.

On the other hand, something strange happened when I was installing KDE. I accidentally uninstalled the Ubuntu flashplugin-nonfree package. Today, when I went to YouTube, Firefox asked me to install the Flash plugin locally (i.e. not system-wide). Since all I had to do was hit OK, I did. Voila, Firefox stopped crashing all the time. Weird.
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bsergean said…
Viola is from the verb violer, to rape in French. I think you meant voila :)

Anyway I was using konqueror a while ago, and it was a good experience. As I'm a KDE user, it's well integrated with the KDE emailer, you can use it as a file browser, put a terminal (konsole) at the bottom of the screen for file browsing. I don't really remember why I switched, maybe for gmail and for flash probably. Spent some good time with Opera, but my distro upgrade screw the fonts, so I'm back on firefox now...
9:16 AM
ephemient said…
Gmail and Konqueror don't get along too well, that's true, but YouTube works perfectly for me, which means that you probably just have a configuration problem.
11:46 AM
schmichael said…
Don't give in to the K, help is on the way!

Sorry for the senseless fanboying. I just couldn't resist. ;) Use whatever you like!

While I'm a loyal Firefox user on Debian, I must admit its been quite unstable in the past, and the performance and memory usage is pretty annoying.

Hopefully WebKit will give us Gnomers a non-Gecko, non-proprietary option!
12:07 PM
Iffy said…
bimone, your etymology is incorrect. I'm sure Shannon was referring to a the english word 'viola' which is similar to a violin but slightly bigger and tuned differently.

'Viola!', in this context, is most likely a reference to classical musicians that, after playing an extremely difficult solo, jump into the air screaming 'Viola!' and proceed by smashing their instrument on to the ground.

Later, rock musicians, such as Pete Townsend of The Who, took on this tradition after getting in touch with their rebelious 'classical' side. After a while, the guitar was substituted because of the high cost of violas and the guitar being so readily available to the rock musician.

Please note that, "Cello!" is a perfectly good exclaimation too. It carries more weight and sounds better as well.

bimone, please get your facts straight before exposing your foolishness in public and on a blog.
12:45 PM
jjinux said…
> Viola is from the verb violer, to rape in French. I think you meant voila :)

/me gasps!

Thanks for telling me. I just fixed it.
1:50 PM
jjinux said…
> Gmail and Konqueror don't get along too well, that's true, but YouTube works perfectly for me,

Yeah, it was working for me too. I think I messed something up. Thanks!
1:51 PM
jjinux said…
> Don't give in to the K, help is on the way!

Interesting!

> Hopefully WebKit will give us Gnomers a non-Gecko, non-proprietary option!

I'm just glad the www isn't just about IE anymore!
1:53 PM
jjinux said…
> iffy said...

rofl!
1:54 PM
jjinux said…
Oops, I spoke too soon. Perhaps I've had Firefox crash on me twice today.
4:59 PM
jjinux said…
Hmm, Konqueror seems to work with GMail if I configure it to masquerade as Safari 2.0.
6:40 PM
jjinux said…
I exported my bookmarks, wiped my .mozilla directory, and started all over. I'm going to try living without extensions for a while. I really like Foxmarks, Firebug, HTML Validator, Selenium, etc., but my memory usage is already half of what it was before. I still installed Flash, though.
7:05 PM
Anonymous said…
I use epiphany for gmail, google reader, youtube, and other heavy sites.

Epiphany's UI sucks wrt firefox but at least is much more stable.

Of course if you want solid rock you should use opera. You know, flashplugin-nonfree is... non "free" :)
11:51 AM
jjinux said…
> flashplugin-nonfree is... non "free" :)

Yeah, I know. It irritates me.
12:30 PM
Anonymous said…
I dunno, I always say "Viola" (pronounced "vi-oh-lah") when things work. It's a tribute to people who read everything fo-net-ik-al-lee. I also think it's funny.
9:29 PM
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