Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products
June 13, 2005

Firefox a hog on Mac OS X?

by Kevin Dangoor

Is it just me, or is Firefox a bit of a hog compared to Safari on Mac OS X? I’ve got a G4 PowerBook, and it runs just fine with Firefox or Safari. But my “hog-o-meter” goes off whenever Firefox is running. What is my “hog-o-meter”? The fan… When I’m using Safari, the PowerBook is entirely silent. When I’m doing my browsing in Firefox, the fan is almost always running and making some noise.

Safari also feels snappier, which is most likely the difference between a XUL-based application and an entirely native one.

As of today, Firefox with the right plugins is an unbeatable browser for web development. It also continues to have the best “type ahead find” implementation I’ve seen. And, I do come across sites every now and then that just don’t work in Safari (but that’s rare enough as to not be a bother).

Browsing is a such a key activity that I don’t mind slowing down my computer a little bit to use the best browser out there. Safari has made some great strides with each new version… perhaps what it really needs is an open plugin architecture. There are a bunch of add-ons available, if you take a look at Pimp My Safari, but from what I’ve read these folks didn’t have an open front door for extending Safari. They had to take advantage of the fact that Mac OS X Cocoa apps have an exceedingly cool architecture that let’s you hook into and manipulate objects in the system. (If you’re a geek and you’ve got a Mac, you should really check out the F-Script Anywhere object browser to see just how much you can do without having “open” APIs.)

June 13, 2005

Trying out Google AdSense

by Kevin Dangoor

This blog has always been for my personal use. I’ve been free to write what I please here and link to whatever I think is interesting and that I want to remember.

I’ve decided to try out Google’s AdSense ads here because:

1. I don’t feel that the ads will change my freedom to write what I wish here. Nothing I’ve written over the past 4 years violates the Terms of Service, so I have no reason to expect I’ll start now.
2. AdSense ads can be unobtrusive. I’ve chosen the text-only ads at this point, and I have no plans to put ads in my RSS feeds. An ad-per-entry in an RSS feed would be nasty, and I’d have to be really sure that they’re not getting in the way of my main content.
3. AdSense *can* add value. I’m going to watch what kind of ads show up, but Google has a terrific advertising model.
4. This site gets enough traffic that some of my hosting costs will be offset by the ads.

To expand on #3 above, I think that Google has grown to $1 billion a year in *profit* because they went after an advertising model in which everyone wins. Overture (formerly Goto, and now part of Yahoo!) pioneered the auction-style pay-per-click model, but Google added a really important element: performance. In order to keep an ad in rotation on Google, the companies have to get a certain percentage of clickthroughs. In other words, the ad has to be relevant and interesting to users.

I’ve seen many people with the same kind of attitude about this that I have: it’s an experiment. If I like what the ads are showing and don’t feel in any way constrained or influenced by them, they’ll stay. Most of the blogs that I’ve seen that have added the ads have stuck with them, so I guess they’ve been working well.

One thing I can assure you that I’m not about to start doing is writing about asbestos or some other topic in which I have no interest whatsoever. That just seems like a waste.

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