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It Done Broke.

ClickToFlash For Safari

ClickToFlash is a nice little Flashblock-type plugin for Safari with one big problem.  Two, actually.

  1. you can’t leave feedback for the developer without creating a (free) account on the project website.  Dude, I just wanted to tell you about #2…
  2. the only way I could find to get into the whitelist and preferences for the plugin is via a page with Flash that isn’t already blocked (there’s a little control on the blocker that gets you in).  However, if you’ve already whitelisted the page there’s no way to get back in and un-whitelist it without going to another site with Flash.  Worse, if you’ve whitelisted it in Fluid (a single-site browser application instance of Safari) there’s no hope at all of making any changes.  You are stuck.

You need to get a preference pane in the main application fast.

One thing about ClickToFlash compared to Flashblock: as I’ve cranked about a few months ago, the Flash media player on MySpace doesn’t load properly in Firefox when you tell Flashblock to unblock.  However, with ClickToFlash in Safari there’s no such problem.  You click, it appears.  Flashblock developers say this is a known bug in the Mozilla code which I should point out nobody seems to be working on.  The Flashblock bug was logged October 2008, the Mozilla bug March 2009 and the feedback comments run in circles.  It’s also suggested that the problem is with the Flash player but ClickToFlash on Safari doesn’t have the same issue.

Score one more for Safari.

Safari 4 Beta

Well, looks like I can retire WebKit for a little while.  The Safari developers have released a beta of version 4.  I had a bit of trouble starting it at first (Mac OSX 10.5.6).  It was the Glims plugin which was crashing it.  I removed it from /Library/Application Support and Safari started up nicely.

Update: Turns out Google Gears doesn’t work in this Safari 4 beta.

Update 2: The Glims developers have release a new version which doesn’t crash Safari, but is missing a chunk of functionality.

Update 3: Safari, even in the development WebKit nightlies exhibited an irritating “bug” with the WordPress 2.7 administrative interface.  It would cause a modal overlay dialog to hang.  The dialog appears when editing a post with the visual editor (e.g. add a link, upload images, etc.).  This is still quite present in 4 beta.

Update 4: (June 11, 2009) The bug mentioned in Update 3 with the modal dialog has been fixed in Safari 4.

Google Gears for Firefox 3.1

Firefox 3.1b2
Google Gears 0.5.4.2

You know what would be really faboo? If the devs for Google Gears figured out it was worthwhile looking at the non-compatibility issue with Firefox 3.1 and Google Gears. I know, I know, it’s free software and there are a million other things to get to. And they’ve said (unofficially) that by the time Firefox 3.1 gets out of beta they’ll be ready. The only reason I’m asking is this:

There are now a preponderance of sites out there now that are JavaScript heavy. All Google products, Facebook, MySpace, and yeah, WordPress – especially the admin backend which is now AJAX supercharged. So when you’re dealing with these sites a lot it really makes a big difference having a browser that can crank through the JS routines and render the damn page already. This is why I’m working with the beta version of Firefox 3.1 (actually, now the OSX optimized version, Shiretoko – there are Windows versions out there too) which has the Tracemonkey JavaScript engine enabled. It’s quite fast; incidentally I’m also testing WebKit, the Safari engine development version which is right up there too.

Anyway, FF 3.1 makes a big difference in shaving off my waiting time, especially here in WordPress-land. And incidentally, the kind folks at WordPress have incorporated Google Gears functionality to offload the download…load. Works great on WebKit/Safari, but since the Gears guys haven’t worked out the FF 3.1 compatibility yet, we’re still waiting.

Not a big rush, really…but it’s Valentine’s Day. Blow me a kiss, boys.

Twitter: crankietech

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