New Facebook layout

I really like the new, cleaner Facebook layout. The older layout causes a great deal more confusion and management difficulty. Emphasizing the activity feeds really moves it closer to solving the difficult problem of centralizing my web activities; FriendFeed accomplishes some of this but feels far less polished. Finding various tools seems easier because of this redesign, though occasionally it still hangs up on me. As it opens up more, though, it’s poised to really take over the world, I think. At least mine, anyway.

(More at Ars Technica.)

UPDATE: Is it just me, or does the new design not really work properly in Firefox?

Firefox Add-ons

This is largely for my own reference but might be useful to others. I generally install these on any Firefox install that I’ll be using for a significant length of time.

• Adblock Plus – greatly reduce banner and flash ads seen
  
• del.icio.us Bookmarks – synchronize your bookmarks and del.icio.us, plus easy tagging
• dragdropupload – simplify choosing of files to upload
  
• Fasterfox – performance tweaks to speed up the browser
  
• Gmail Manager – best extension for handling Gmail
• Google Calendar Notifier – as above
• Google Notebook – page includes other extensions from Google too
• Google Toolbar for Firefox – quick access to lots of tools; usually I set the main search box to Wikipedia and use the toolbar for everything else
• Mouse Gestures Redox – quick navigation without using context menus and buttons
• NoScript - control JavaScript, Flash, and PDF
• Scrapbook – save local copies of web pages
• ShowIP – show the IP address to which you are actually connected
• Tab Mix Plus – extra control options to customize tabs
• Tamper Data – modify headers and post parameters
• TwitterFox – send and check Twitters
• Web Developer – indispensable set of tools

Flock

Flock is a “social browser” based on the Firefox 3 code base with additional support for Web 2.0 baked into it. That is, it has sidebars for social networking sites, detects media streams, comes with support for blogging (this post is being done from inside the Flock tool), and more.

It does the job pretty well, but it feels overly heavy. The UI is really busy and sometimes arcane. I’m not sure what it gains me other than avoiding installing some Firefox add-ons that I’ve already grown to know and love.

Blogged with the Flock Browser