Trying out Firefox 4 Beta 4.

For a good long time have been a Firefox beta tester. So far, was pretty much settled with Firefox 3.6.x, but now have started to test Firefox 4. So far, the first impression I had was .. “its lighter”. But wait, more on that later.

There is an instant feedback add-on installed with FF4, as simple as “Firefox makes me happy/sad” links.

The rendering engine is better sure. But the big down part of trying new Firefox beat/releases is the lack of support for existing extensions. For me personally, I tend to use extensions with Firefox than say Firefox with extensions! In earlier times, I would just unpack, the xpi files and change the supported Firefox versions. But not right now.

Also, continuing on the observation that this new installation is lighter/faster, I think it goes only as far as installing or enabling all the extensions I use. Yes, no doubt that Firefox is a big memory hogger at times, atleast on the windows platform. My home Firefox(3.6.10Pre on Ubuntu) is much faster I believe.

Will post more updates later.

Ubuntu clive http 404 error solution.

Update:
For 11.04’s clive version 2.2.13, the youtube video URLs are throwing the following error.

error: no match: `(?-xism:fmt_url_map=(.*?)&)'

and the solution for this is to pick the package from Ubuntu 11.10 oneiric which is of version 2.2.25-2 as of this writing.

Clive is very useful commandline utility to extract video from video websites like youtube.com and vimeo.com. The recent update to youtube url is causing clive to fail for any youtube url, giving unknown http/404 errors. Although the upstream is fixed the ubuntu package is still not updated with the same version i.e as of this writing clive_2.2.12-1.

In the meantime you can download the debian package for sid from here.