How Microsoft made me leave Google Chrome

.. well, not really

As I wrote in my previous post I am busy building a Silverlight application. This week I did some more work and ran into some very weird behavior.

I was debugging the communication between the Silverlight app and the web service and I ran into very strange errors. I noticed that in my final call in the webservice two string values were assigned to the wrong variables. They were swapped. The variable username held a piece of xml and the variable drawingXml held the username. Looking through my code I could not find the line of code where I made the mistake.

It was getting late already and this is still a POC, so I decided to just swap the place of the parameters in the method definition and investigate further at some other moment.

I stopped the debugger, made the change, inserted a breakpoint and started debugging again. That's when I completely lost any understanding of what was going on.

It was late already as I said and I blamed that and I was too tired to think straight and probably was debugging at the wrong place in the application. I decided it had to be me and had to just let it be. I walked a block with the dog and went to bed

The next day

The problem stuck and I had to investigate further so I started to change my Silverlight application so it would show some debug info in the browser to make things easier to debug.

That's where things started to go even crazier. The Silverlight application didn't show anything. The TextBlock I had added to the XAML wasn't showing up! I tried again and again. But nothing!

Image via Wikipedia

Then I realized that Google Chrome (my default browser) had a problem with caching. The Silverlight application in the browser was an old version of the application. Apparently, Chrome was not refreshing the XAP file!

Googling about I saw some posts about the same problems developers had with Flash. Then I sighed and I knew it was not me.

Google Chrome

So, that was it for me. I had to revert "back" to Firefox for debugging Silverlight applications. A weird feeling having to step away from Google Chrome.

I still remember that I watched the launch live on my laptop. I watched the first part in Firefox and started downloading during the presentation. Installed Chrome and watched the last part in Chrome. I also set it to be my default browser and only occasionally I use Firefox and other browsers. Well, I have to I build websites!

Microsoft made me do it

So, in a way Microsoft made me switch browsers, made me move away from Chrome.

But it's not that dramatic. I only use Firefox now for debugging Silverlight and for day to day browsing I still use Chrome.

Had I been a Flash developer, it would have been Adobe that made me switch from Chrome back to Firefox. But still only for debugging.

Trying out another Firefox extension

.. as if I needed yet another one

Today I installed the ScribeFire extension in Firefox. Former known as Performancing for Firefox.

The extension supposedly makes blogging a lot easier. And not just blogging on Blogger, but more than that. You can connect to multiple blog applications. You can keep notes. But it doesn't make you a cappucino.

Needs some getting used to

It sits snuggly in the bottom right corner of the status bar and it pops up at the bottom in a nice big size. It does seem to have quite a few options and I will need time to tweak these to my liking. As I am a source writer (I insert my own html tags) I may need more time to find out how I can make it produce the right type of html. I don't want <br/> for instance, I want the pure pleasure of the <p> tag.

I might get back on this extension.

This post was written the good old Blogger Editor, the previous post I initially fired off using ScribeFire, but then edited it in the Blogger Editor as I did not like the html.

Almost vacation

.. but I'll give you this

This might not be completely original and very new, but I just discovered it and thoughht I would share it with you, dear reader.

Taking a Safari

.. without going to Africa

For some years now I am devoted user of the Firefox browser. I just love the myriad of extensions as a user and the web standard implementation as a developer. I just can not live without the DOM Inspector or Firebug.

But ..

But I always knew that there was supposedly a better browser out there that was even better at rendering according to the standards: Safari. It tickled me and made me aware that in that area Firefox was just not the best browser. Close maybe, but not the best. And aaaaargh Safari was only available on Apple. Eventhough Apple computers have been very tempting and I have seriously thought about getting myself a Mini, I never really got round it.

Now things have changed a bit: you can now download a beta version of Safari 3 that you can install on OS X or on Windows XP or Vista.

I'll take a look at my blog and see how it looks in Safari! [singing]It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining I feel good, nothing 's gonna stop me now[sorry].

Tags:

• Safari
• Firefox
• windows

Firefox usage grows slowly

.. but steadily

As the French research Xiti shows in its recent report Firefox usage is steadily progressing in Europe.

Looking the average of Europe we see a steady climb from 19.4 % to 24.1% over the last year. Adding an almost 5% share! Impressive to say the least. The share has been growing more than 24% in a years time. Wow!

These are still very good numbers! I would have thought that growth would maybe slowdown, but no. It is still going steady.

Worldwide we see that Australia has the biggest Firefox share, 24.8%. North America is a bit behind on 15.1%. But looking at the numbers for the Netherlands they are still ahead of our 13.3%. That number has dropped 0.7% since last November. Weird.

It only goes to show that there are lies, big lies and statistics.