Glims for Safari

Firefox was a clear winner this far... the sheer configurability and the usability edge it had over Safari. Being a Mac user , Safari was the natural choice though... the easy integration with OSX (Keychain et al) was indeed convenient. Easily faster and lighter than Firefox , Safari 4 would be the perfect browser what with its slowly but steadily growing list of plugins ...if only Apple could have done away with the usability issues that turn me off in v4.
However, what saved the day is Glims.(Get it here). Here is a quick and dirty list of things that I used to miss the most that make the Safari experience so much better now.

• Adding and managing search engines. Lets me add shortcuts and keywords like in FF.
• Undo Close Tab (Command-Z). Big convenience for the clumsy me.
• Autocomplete in forms
  
• Saving tabs from last session
• Better managed download folders - dated downloads
• Closes download window by default . Small detail but liked it.
• Suggested search previews in the search toolbar. Jazzier than FF if not better.
• Tab navigation using . and ,
  

None of these are things which make it better than FF but all of them definitely bring it at par with its interface.
Next on my list to improve my Safari window are SafariStand , FLVR (or VideoBox now) and TabExpose

First day with Windows 7

Finally found time to install and start running Win 7 on my Apple machine. A quick upgrade to Bootcamp made sure the installation went on pretty smoothly. At the end of it , the only problem I'm stuck with is the missing drivers (the trackpad refuses to work for one). Will get around to it sometime.

So the much hyped user interface is actually good. Though being a Mac user , I didn't find anything remarkable in any of the new razzmatazz. The OS is noticeably faster , cleaner, shinier. For anyone used to the old Windows interface, a few changes could take a day or so to get used to (have seen people fumble a little with the new Control Panel layout, similarly with the IIS management ), but all in all refreshing changes.

A funny thing happened ,though , when the Win7 machines were first plugged into the LAN, the PCs refused to connect. Suspecting a larger network issue , our sysadmin set out to unravel why. Turned out when the Win7 machines sent out a gratuitous ARP request, they actually received a response...each time! And not because of some IP conflict. Looked like the machine ended up responding to its own gratuitous ARP creating an appearance of another machine on the network with the same IP. A registry tweak finally resolved the issue but has to be done on each Win7 machine to let it log on to the network.

This is more a cute-funny mistake than a bug probably but for market leaders on desktop OSs , as a colleague puts it... "banta nahi Bhai"("It's not done, dude").