Posted on

Firefox Quantum Is Very Fast

A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded the new Firefox web browser (v. 57) which Mozilla named Firefox Quantum. For a couple of minutes, I had to get used to the user interface which differed from Google Chrome. As I started browsing, I noticed that web sites loaded faster and the browsing experience was snappier overall.

Mozilla is overhauling components of Firefox to better support concurrency and to improve performance. Starting with version 57, things have changed for the better. I have been using Firefox for several weeks now and am very happy with it. Aside from being very fast even compared to Google Chrome, I have noticed that memory usage is better than Chrome’s. With nineteen tabs open, for example, memory usage is more reasonable than Chrome’s and performance seems not to have degraded.

Since I have 16 GB of RAM on my Macs, I have set the “content process limit” for Firefox to 5 (4 is the recommended maximum) since I normally open a lot of tabs.  Setting the content process limit higher consumes more memory but helps in handling more concurrently open tabs.Firefox Content Process Limit

Firefox Quantum uses Gecko and Servo. Written in the Rust programming language, the Servo project is Mozilla’s venture to build a new web browser engine. Parts of Firefox Quantum depend on Servo in order to achieve high performance and concurrency. The other parts of Firefox are written in C++.

For developers of web applications, the Firefox Quantum Developer Edition is most useful. You can simultaneously run both browsers without conflict of profiles. I’ve used this edition of Firefox Quantum to debug some web applications I have been working on.

 

Posted on

HTML5 and Semantic Markups

I just got a book from Amazon.com called HTML5 & CSS3 For The Real World.   Published by Sitepoint, this book is a wonderful read.  The still-evolving new HTML specification has a lot of semantic markups that help web authors add meaning to the various components of a web page.  These semantic markups not only give meaning to the structure of an HTML document but also aids in styling of the page.

HTML5 is not just about fancy features.  It’s also about building HTML documents that make sense when analyzed for structure and design.  One aspect of HTML documents that is important is the outline of the document contents.  To aid in authoring HTML5 documents, there are some tools that analyze the documents’ structure.  One of these tools is the HTML5 Outliner,  which takes advantage of the outline algorithm for HTML5.  Try using it in your HTML5 projects and experiments to see if you have a semantically correct HTML document.

It is also important to understand the meaning and use of the various HTML5 markup elements.  Their use determines the logical structure of a document, aside from the styling.  There are certain HTML markup elements that should only be used in certain contexts.  One case is the use of the <em> and <strong> tags.   While <em> is used for emphatic stress, <strong> should be used for a span of text that has strong importance.

The proper and canonical use of HTML5 markup elements should be of concern to today’s web authors.  Reading the HTML5 specs carefully, even if they are still evolving,  is a good thing.  It’s best to future proof your HTML projects now.   See the Website Design and Construction page of this site for links to helpful resources.

 

 

Posted on

Space Battleship Yamato Live Action Movie Released

About a week ago, the live action movie version of Space Battleship Yamato was released to theaters in Japan.  SBY was an anime shown back in the early 70’s that had great influence on the development of anime.  It was later released in the USA as “Star Blazers“, with the ship renamed as “The Argo”.

The Yamato was Japan’s Navy’s flagship during World War 2.  In the anime (and most probably in the movie too), they used the structure of the sunken ship as basis for the space battleship.

If you visit the SBY website, you can watch the new trailer for the movie.  The effects look good and it should since they spent a lot of money on this movie, with movie tie-ins everywhere in Japan.  I hope they release a nice replica of the Space Battleship Yamato.  I’ll check again on eBay if it’s available already.

Posted on

New Blog Site

I migrated http://albertusunbound.wordpress.com/ to http://www.albertus.org/ today because I wanted more control over the site.  It wasn’t too difficult to migrate and setup WordPress on another server since I read the manual.  😉

WordPress is suitable for my purposes at this moment.  If I need to migrate to something else like Drupal, I’ll just have to do it.  WordPress already has enough features to keep me happy in the years to come.

I hope to write more often this time.  It’s not easy for me to think of a topic to write about simply because I keep myself busy with other things.  Perhaps I need to structure my time a bit more so I can spend more time on blogging.

By the way, take a peek at these websites:

LinuxUnbound is one of my sites where I post stuff about Linux.  Alumni.NET, on the other hand, is a global organization registry that has been around since 1994.  It started as a simple registry for a single high school.  It now features some social networking features.

Well, I’ll post more stuff later.

Posted on

Trying Out Aardvark

I have recently been using Aardvark, a service recently acquired by Google, to ask questions about things of interests such as computer and martial arts stuff.  The service works by forwarding your questions to experts selected using some AI algorithm.  The company that runs Aardvark does employ PhDs in artificial intelligence to build and enhance the service.

Aardvark is promoted as a social search engine.  You can post and receive messages via a number of ways including instant messaging or mobile phones.  There’s also a way of linking your Aardvark account to your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

So far, I’ve been receiving pretty good information about the things I asked.  I encourage you all to try the service.  Google seems to have plans to integrate this to their products as part of their initiative to enhance their prowess in social networking stuff.  Right now, Aardvark is part of Google Labs and is still active.