A Quantum Immortal

I’ve resisted the Chrome buzz so far, but today I’ve fallen too. Even though Firefox is somewhat sluggish in comparison to Chrome, I like its multitude of extensions and frankly, I’m just used to it.

However, today I finally gave up, because of a missing feature in Firefox – the ability to view source of an RSS/Atom feed. As far as I’ve been able to discern, it’s impossible in FF3 to view the raw XML of a feed (just try opening this feed and clicking View Source). I found several posts on how to manually edit a javascript file to disable this preview, but they must not apply to FF3 because … they didn’t work.

So my workaround was Chrome (haven’t switched over as a main browser though). What’s most annoying is I’m sure there was a way to do this, because before I switch computers a week ago I was able to view the raw feed – I just can’t remember how.

Update – it seems the pesky problem we were having for HTTP/1.1 is actually still relevant to us. The problem is we cannot force .NET framework to properly close a response stream within the HttpWebResponse – the thread just waits forever. Sucks, but it appears we have to use HTTP/1.0 for the time being, at least until we manage to hack it someway (understand how the class works internally and hack it away).

Working for the Diggers team in a search engine, a large chunk of our tasks is writing sophisticated web crawlers.

We were using HTTP/1.0 because we didn’t need any features in 1.0, and to circumvent a problem we thought we had with 1.1. On such a crawl mission, I discovered today that MSN’s site does not support HTTP/1.0.

After another check we found that the above problem does not affect us, because it is only relevant the Microsoft Compact Framework. But it’s still a rather shock to find a large site (even though it’s Microsoft) that utterly does not support HTTP/1.0.

Try it yourself – go to about:config in Firefox and set network.http.version to 1.0, and then surf to MSN. You’ll get a blank page. What actually happens is MSN assumes you’re using HTTP/1.1, and sends you a chunked response. Your web browser will not parse a chunked response, and rightly so.

(Needless to say that HTTP is supposed to be backward compatible).

After Eran sent me this funny video today explaining GreeseMonkey (I knew it before, but it’s still funny), I looked up a few user scripts from this list. These are the ones that look most useful to me:

• LookItUp – look up stuff in Wikipeida by highlighting text and pressing ‘w’.
• Google Account Multi-Login – Change “Logout” button in Gmail to “Switch Users”. Didn’t work for me and some other recent users, but seems cool if it works.
• Google Image Relinker – Google Images search results now has links to the images themselves, instead of to the containing webpage. Very useful.
• Script Updater – Auto Update your scripts

For those who don’t know or forgot this, Shlomo posted how in 3 easy steps you can view all stored usernames & passwords on Firefox.

Not that scary, because you should only save password on a computer you trust. But still, I would have removed that feature or at least have a master password to access it.