greenthinks

Dave Winer, who is now using a mac for many things, is having some trouble with the latest release of Firefox, version 1.5 (rc2):

I’m using the old version of Firefox on my laptop, and it confirms my impression that they took a feature out of the browser in the latest release that I want back.

If you single click on the URL in the address field, the whole thing is selected. That’s the old, correct behavior. The new behavior is to give you a caret and make you manually select all the text. But it’s so easy to select part of the URL if that’s what you want (when exactly do you want that, btw). As a blogger selecting URLs in that bar is on the path to my linking to something, and I fight against anything that makes that path longer. The Firefox guys just did that. Why?

I figured out the solution. It turns out the Mozilla guys did not totally alter the functionality Dave is talking about. Rather they just swtiched the default. In versions of Firefox prior to 1.5 there was an entry in the config (about:config) called “browser.urlbar.ClickSelectsAll,” which was by default set to True. The only change in 1.5 was to set it as default to False. Not sure why that makes sense to them, but in any case Dave, all you need to do in 1.5 is change that back to True and you’re on your way.

Yesterday Microsoft made some pretty big announcements, and while much of the web does not seem to understand their significance, at least some of the stuff they showed off yesterday is getting some real buzz. Only problem, there is no stream of the announcement available from Microsoft’s web site. We know that one exists, since Scoble was watching it internally. Microsoft, please open it up to the rest of us?

Maybe it has something to do with Dave Winer’s comments on the presentation…

This is the stupid message I get from Microsoft Word today, while working on my latest paper. But wait, I thought there is no Hebrew support in Microsoft Word on my mac? That’s right! So it is NOT that the Hebrew proofing tools (dictionary and other info that Word uses for each language) are not installed, it’s rather that they’re not available. Microsoft, if you’re going to make business decisions to exclude a capability from your program, have the decency not to complain that that capability isn’t installed, as though it is somehow my fault!?