Peppermint 5: I'm disappointed

I was an early adopter of Peppermint OS, and a big fan. This was in the days when Peppermint was not numbered, but known as Ice, and other innovative browsers like Flock were recognising that the mushrooming of social media sites and the emergence of cloud computing were going to take us all into regions that we hadn't even thought of. Ice had a small footprint, the Ice app, cloud-centric design, and was fast -- even on under-powered machines. I loved it. I loved One, Two, and Three as well. But then came Peppermint Four and Peppermint Four was ultimately too finicky and frustrating for me to use. I I always seemed to have problems with panels and the Chromium browser the OS was built on. Well, I was triple-booting as usual, so I just stuck to Mint and whatever else I was running as an alternative. I was sad to lose Peppermint but content. Yet I wanted Peppermint to do well.

Recently Peppermint Five was released, to some acclaim. Most reviewers wrote as if Peppermint Five was a new OS, not a revamped one, and I was encouraged enough to download the ISO and run it. The live CD worked well and so I installed it...

But for me the same problems are there. Compared to Mint and elementary Freya (my current first choices) Peppermint 5 is sluggish, crash-prone, unreliable and user unfriendly. It doesn't help that Mint (Cinnamon) and elementary Freya look better too.

I'm very disappointed, especially since I believe the real mobile revolution is not in hardware but a move away from desktops to browsers (as in Google's Chromebooks) and Peppermint could be a real leader here.

One final word. On Mint and Freya I use Mozilla's Firefox, and with the power of its add-ons, these have become very browser-centric for me and easy to sync with my android phones. Perhaps Peppermint could try using Mozilla again?

Firefox 4 ppa

Firefox 4 ppa



I've been using the Firefox 4 beta for a while now and like it a lot--it's fast and a great improvement on Fox 3xxx although I won't say it's better than Chromium. It's now out of beta, so if you want to add the ppa to your system, fire up a terminal and type in the following:
   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install firefox ubufox

and you'll be in business.
  
  

Browser Wars (new edition) Opera alpha

The Browser Wars continue with Opera's "pre-alpha" release 10.5. Basically this a techie/geek release--not for real everyday use, not even really for testing--just to show off some new stuff; but it's FAST! Faster even than Google's Chrome. Because it's an unfinished release, pix are not fully rendered, but there's a gr8 r-click tool that enables you to open any open page in another browser of your choice [I've been wanting this feature to reappear since I first used it with Cyberdog back in 1986 or so]. If you're up for some fun, try it out. Available now (as they say) from Opera's site.

Google Chrome: Browser Wars (contd)

With the latest devbuild, I can see that Chromium/Chrome (Google's new-style browser) is getting stronger; and I must say that I like it. It's simply designed, but elegant in a zen way; and the search+address bar feels so right, so intuitive that browsing becomes a much better experience. Already I'm using this browser on a daily basis, even though there's so much unfinished about it that most people would probably think it isn't worth the bother. [Wait till they try it though.] In short, this is shaping up to be a killer app!

Browser Wars 2008

The browser wars are hotting up & they're interesting to watch. Those who are even slightly savvy about the Internet and its tech know that Microsoft's IExplorer is definitely not the browser to choose for any reason--it's slower than the competition, bulky, less intuitive and of course the one most likely to spawn viruses. It's also, natch, the most-used browser of all since choosing an alternative requires a bit of extra effort (IE comes bundled as the built-in virus portal with every Windoze PC sold).
   There's a good choice of alternatives available now: Safari (Apple's own and the one resident on Nokia phones); Firefox (version 3 is imminent); and Opera are the three big ones. Then there's Flock, which is radically different. In addition a number of experimental fly-fasts are available: Shiira and Sunrise are the first to come to mind; and then Camino...
   What to choose? Well Flock is the must-have if you're a blogger or facebook/twitter fan, and since it's built upon Firefox, Fox plug-ins usually work on Flock too--a big plus. But it's wise to never stick to one. I'm posting this from Flock, but Safari's also up-and-running right now in the background.
   My hardware is an Apple G4 laptop running OSX Tiger.

Blogged with the Flock Browser