Blog blog("Baptiste Wicht"); (Posts about Google)

I got rid of Vivaldi browser for Google Chrome

Baptiste Wicht — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 07:31:45 GMT

About a year ago, I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi. This week, I decided to get rid of Vivaldi and replaced with Google Chrome. In this post, I'm going to outline the reasons why I got rid of it.

Before, I switched to Vivaldi because Firefox was dropping support for XUL/XPCOM extensions and I was using Pentadactyl. In fact, Pentadactyl was the only reason I was using Firefox. It was slow and bloated and a bit unstable, but the extension was making it worth. Since they are dropping support for such extensions, I did not want to use Firefox anymore. So I switched to Vivaldi with Vimium. It's not as great as Firefox plus Pentadactyl. But it's a more customizable version of Google Chrome on which it's based.

But, in that year or so of using Vivaldi, I have had many issues. Some of them were not too bad and there was some workarounds. But they continued to pile up and they did not fix any of them so now, I decided it's too much.

Since the beginning, it always has been slow. It's not really bad, but still noticeable compared to Chrome. Especially opening Vivaldi is pretty bad. This is something I can live with, but they should really do something to make it faster.

The thing that I had the most issues with is multimedia. For instance Youtube (but all the other platforms have the same issues).

The first problem with media is to get a video in fullscreen. Most of the time, when I press the fullscreen button on Youtube, it grays out the screen and I have to press ESC. If I do that around five to ten times, it finally goes fullscreen. It may be because of my multi-monitor setup but Google Chrome has no issues whatsoever with that. It's pretty painful to do, but again I could live for since I don't use full screen a lot.

A second problem I had with media is they were running too fast. I'm not kidding, really too fast, not too slow. The media was running about twice too fast, you could see the seconds going fast on Youtube. I never seen this issue in any other tool, but it was happening at every start of Vivaldi. The fix was to restart Vivaldi every time this happened and the video played normally.

Another problem I had from the beginning is to make all HTML5 videos work. You have to download the binary plugins from Chrome to let Vivaldi play all HTML5 videos. It's not a big deal, but the problem is that they are overwritten after each update of Vivaldi. So you have to do it all the time.

A new media issue I had on the last update of Vivaldi is with Flash. At the beginning it was working even if it was outdated. I just had to confirm to run it with a warning. But, since the last update, I only had the warning that it was outdated. But I could not confirm to use it, the option was not here anymore. And it was still happening after I updated Flash... The only option to run Flash was to use a private navigation window...

And finally, I had another big issue with the last version of Vivaldi as well. The browser keeps crashing on my work computer. It can stay up a few minutes and then crash. The complete interface is not updated. I can still press the tabs and I can see the title of the window change, but the interface does not update. Again, it may come from my special window manager (I use awesome), but it's the only application not working...

With all these issues and especially the last two new problems, I decided it was time to cut the losses. So I reinstalled Google Chrome, transferred my plugins and everything worked like a charm. I still use Vimium to use vim bindings so my usage of the browser does not change. Of course, I don't have the customization that I had with Vivaldi. I would really really like to get rid of the address bar in the browser. I would also like to significantly reduce the size of the tab bar. But I prefer to live without these improvements than with so many bugs. I think Vivaldi is a good idea, but with a terrible implementation.

I also considered qutebrowser as an alternative. But for now it's still missing many features that I don't want to get rid of. So I will stay with Google Chrome for the time being.

What about you ? Do you have any experience with Vivaldi ?

Vivaldi + Vimium = Finally no more Firefox!

Baptiste Wicht — Sat, 14 Jan 2017 19:55:26 GMT

I've been using the Pentadactyl Firefox extension for a long time. This extensions "vimifies" Firefox and it does a very good job of it. This is probably the best extension I have ever seen on any browser. This post is really not against Pentadactyl, this is a great addon and it still works great.

However, I have been more and more dissatisfied of Mozilla Firefox over the years. Indeed, the browser is becoming slower and slower all the time and I'm experiencing more and more issues on Gentoo with it. But the biggest problem I've with Firefox right now is the philosophy of the developers that is really crappy. Currently, there is only one thing that is good in Firefox compared to the other browsers, its extensions. Basically, an extension in Firefox can do almost anything. Pentadactyl is able to transform most of the interface and get rid of all of the useless parts of the interface. It is currently impossible to do so in other browsers. These powerful addons are using the XUL/XPCOM programming interface to do so. Pentadactyl is the only reason I've kept to Firefox so long. But Firefox has announced, already more than a year ago, that it will deprecate its XUL/XPCOM interface in favour of webextensions. This means that a lot of very good addons will not be able to work anymore once the deprecation has been completed. Several writers of popular Firefox have announced that they will not even try to port their addons and some addons will simply not be possible anymore. This is the case for Pentadactyl which is on the line for when the deprecation occurs. The data for deprecated has already been delayed but is likely to come anyway.

For several months, I've been looking at several possible replacements for my current Pentadactyl browser. I've tried qutebrowser, but it is really too limited in terms of features so far. I've also tried again Chromium which is a great browser but unfortunately, there are very few possibilities for addons to modify the interface. Vimium is a great addon for Chromium which is basically the very much more lightweight alternative to Pentadactyl. It has much less features, but most of the missing features are simply things that cannot be done in Chromium.

Only recently did I test Vivaldi. Vivaldi is a free multi-platform browser, based on Chromium and supporting Chromium extensions. The major difference with Chrome is how the UI is customizable, due to the use of a dynamic UI, stylable with CSS. With the customizability of Vivaldi plus the great shortcuts and vim-like behaviour of vimium, I really feel like I found a new Pentadactyl with the advantage of not having to bear Firefox!

Here is how it is looking with the follow URLs feature from vimium:

Note: The gray bar on the left is the console to the left and the top kind of bar is awesome wm, they are not part of the browser.

I'm using the dark theme with native windows. I've disabled the address bar, moved the tab bar to the bottom and completely hidden the side panel. All that remained was the title bar and the scroll bar.

To get rid of the title bar, you can use CSS. First, you have to only display the Vivaldi button in the settings page. Then, you can use this custom CSS:

button.vivaldi {
    display: none !important;
}

#header {
    min-height: 0 !important;
    z-index: auto !important;
}

.button-toolbar.home { display: none }

to hide the title completely! To get rid of the scroll bar, you need to use the Stylish extension and use this custom CSS:

::-webkit-scrollbar{display:none !important; width:0px;}
::-webkit-scrollbar-button,::-webkit-scrollbar-track{display:none !important;}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb{display: none !important;}
::-webkit-scrollbar-track{display: none !important;}

And then, no more scroll bar :)

If you want to have full HTML5 video support, you need to install extra codecs. On Gentoo, I've uploaded a ebuild on my overlay (wichtounet on layman) with the name vivaldi-ffmpeg-codecs and everything should be working fine :)

Vimium is clearly inferior to Pentadactyl in that for instance it only works in web page, not in system page and you still have to use the browser for a few things, but it does not seem too bar so far. Moreover, I wasn't using all the features of Pentadactyl. I haven't been used this browser for a long time, so maybe there are things that I will miss from Pentadactyl, but I won't certainly miss Firefox!

Google+ is now open to all

Baptiste Wicht — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:50:53 GMT

After about 90 days of trial on invitation-only mode, Google+ is now open to everybody.

For those who don't know, Google+ is the social network platform of Google, with several interesting features like Circles, Hangouts, ...

For example, you can see my page on Google+.

Personally, I find this social network very interesting, but there are not enough people on it to concurrence really Facebook and the others networks. Don't hesitate to give it a try, it's worth it!

No more ads on the site !

Baptiste Wicht — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:33:07 GMT

Hi,

As you have perhaps noticed, there is no more Google Adsense on the site. I removed them for several reasons :

They were not really visually good
They slowed down the site by a factor of two
That gave a bad image of the site
This is not the main goal of the website to make money
They didn't made enough money to counter the previous disadvantages

So you will now have a faster and a bit nicer website to look at :)

The only page that contains ads on the site is the search because of the use of Google Custom Search that includes Google Ads, but this is not my ads. I will perhaps consider to add another search system in the future.

I hope this will make the site more enjoyable

P.S. Is there is still a page with ads that I have forgotten to update, just let a comment with the URL of the page and I will remove the ads

Save time with the Gmail Priority Inbox

Baptiste Wicht — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 03:44:27 GMT

Some days ago, Gmail released a new feature, the Priority Inbox. Actually, the feature is not released on all accounts, but if it is released on yours, you can see a message "Try Gmail Priority Inbox", in top right high corner, just after your user name.

Once you activated this new inbox, you will see two inbox, the new Priority Inbox on top and the old Inbox. The Inbox has not changed, but now you can use the Priority Inbox. In this view, you will see your messages sorted in two categories, the first one contains the important unread messages and the second one contains all the other messages.

If you found an error, namely a non-important message tagged as important or the contrary, you have two new buttons :

With these buttons, you can move a message from the priority messages to the others and vice versa. When you do that, the algorithm between the sorting will save your action and try to improve the efficiency of the Priority Inbox to not make the same error again.

At this time, I'm completely happy with this new feature, I've had only one message marked as important that was not, but it's all. I think it's a great tool that Google has offerred to us.

If you want more informations, let's watch this video from Google :

Links of the week (April 20)

Baptiste Wicht — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 05:20:28 GMT

Some interesting links of the week:

Poll Results: We're Not Quite Ready For Web Based IDEs : Interesting poll results on how the developers are ready about web based IDEs
How to localise a Play Framework application : Peter Hilton explain how internationalize a Play! Framework application
The Top 15 Google Products for People Who Build Websites
Swinging Task Dialog (part 5) : Eugene Ryzhikov continue its suite on developing a Swing Task Dialog, adding new functionaly.
How to determine a prime number in Java : An interesting development on how to determine a prime number in an efficent way

10 most useful Google Tools

Baptiste Wicht — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 04:24:53 GMT

More than provide an extremely powerful search engine used by almost everybody, Google provides also a lot of very useful tools. In this post, i list the 10 most useful Google tools from my point of view.

1. Gmail

For me, this is the best email client ever. The interface is quick and reactive and there are many interesting features. The spam filter is really powerful, i have no more spams since i've switched to GMail a long time ago. The storage capacity (~7.4 Go) is also totally enough. Moreover, this client is totally integrated with the other tools of the Google network (Documents, Buzz, Agenda, ...). With the plugins, you can also add several others features to GMail including integrating with other tools like RememberTheMilk by example.

The included chat is also a great functionality. I use it everyday.

No more spam with : Google Mail

Drag and drop files to Gmail

Baptiste Wicht — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:09:44 GMT

The Gmail team has just added a great new functionality to Gmail.

Until now, to add attachment to your mails, you had to click "Attach a file", find the good file and click it.

Now, you can directly drag the file from your file system to Gmail :

It's a little functionality, but that save a lot of time and that's the kind of feature we (computer scientist) love.

Try it, that's awesome !

Tip : The bookmarks bar disappears on Google Chrome !

Baptiste Wicht — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:15:44 GMT

I Found that my bookmarks bar on Google Chrome disappear sometimes. This behavior is very confusing, is searched a few and i find that it was me that make it disappears and appears.

On Google Chrome, you can hide/display the bookmarks bar using + .

Hope that will help someone.

Improve performance of your web site with Page Speed

Baptiste Wicht — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:55:29 GMT

Page Speed is a Firefox addon who add a new functionality to Firebug enabling the user to evaluate and improve the performances of a web site.

Although as improving perofrmances of a web site is no longer as critical as in the past with the evolution of new technologies, this has some advantages :

Make your site faster and logically more cumfortable for users. Moreover, all the users doesn't have broadband and improve the rendering speed can save users.
Reduce the used bandwith and the hosting costs
Improve the web itself respecting some simple rules.

Discover how to achieve this objectives with Page Speed.

Google Analytics goes asynchronous !

Baptiste Wicht — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:37:10 GMT

From this month, Google provide a new Google Analytics script that works in an asynchronous way.

This has several advantages :

The time to load the script has less impact on the page loading time.
Best data recovery and so more saved visits. The visits terminated before the script loading doesn't happens anymore. Because, due to the asynchronous way of loading, we can add the analytics code in the head of the page.
Less tracking errors.

Voici le nouveau code à insérer dans vos pages :

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script');
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 
        'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');
    document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);
  })();

We have to note that this code use the async parameter of HTML 5 and that functionality is not supported by all the browsers. If you use that script in a non HTML-5 Browser, the script will be executed exactly as the old Analytics script in an synchronous way.

That's a good news for the fans of performances.

Source : Google Analytics Launches Asynchronous Tracking