Brennan’s Blog

More and more applications have their own automatic updaters. I use several of them and the upgrade experience among them is good and bad. Paint.NET checks for an update when the application is started and gives you the option to download it and install it. Installing the update requires restarting the application. The experience is not bad, but not as smooth as others. Adobe Acrobat has the worst update experience. The updates come so often and offer no real value to an already extremely bloated program. It is supposed to be just a PDF reader but Adobe seems to be including everything to exploit their strangle hold over this file format. To make matters worse, the startup and update screen is hidden behind all of your other applications which causes your web browser to appear to freeze when you click on a link to a PDF accidentally. Adobe Acrobat is so bad that many websites warn you about the PDF links. The only way to escape this horrible application updater is to switch to FoxIt Reader which is lightweight and unobtrusive.

(more...)

It is officially out tomorrow, but you can get it today. You can find it through a mirror. I got mine from California.

So far it has already caught a misspelled word for me and it seems so much faster. Now that IE7 and Firefox 2.0 are out, I am certain there will be some great articles comparing the two. What I hope to see is a standards compatibility checklist for both of these browsers. I want to know what JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML features they support and what is missing. I expect such a list will be posted at WaSP or QuirksMode.