I installed Firefox 0.9 hours after it was released, and have been playing with it for a few days. A few observations are in order.
1. It crashes … on sites that older versions render correctly. Firefox 0.8 never crashed on me, and in older versions, the only problem I’ve seen has been due to the textbox completion bug.
2. It does Complex Text Layout better, for Indic languages. It seems to handle zero width glyphs correctly, which is a major improvement, but it still does not handle “negative width” glyphs correctly.
3. What’s with the default xft build? Doesnt anyone else believe that anti aliasing regular fonts is a bad idea ? Looks like I’ll have to rebuild from source, which I have tried to avoid, since building mozilla isnt your usual cofigure/make deal.
4. My favourite theme doesn’t work with 0.9, and its replacement is no match to the elegance of the original. So I’ve been messing around in the theme definitions to create my own… the biggest barrier currently is the fact that I cant find a way to test a new theme without packaging it up!
Gregory Chaitin has put up on the web his wonderful new book Meta Math! - The Quest for Omega (via Tim Bray ). Some random thoughts … apart from the fact that the book itself is brilliant.
1. I’ve always wondered why Gödel’s work on Incompleteness and Turing’s work on Uncomputability isn’t as well known (from my purely layman’s perspective of course) as I would imagine it should be. This lack of popularity is strange - in its time, Russel’s paradox and Hilberts challenges were very big deals, and therefore, many thought that Gödel’s proof destroyed the raison d’être for pure mathamatics. Chaitin however provides a plausible reason… by the time these theories were catching on, in the late thirties, the world that more serious things to be worried about than the incompleteness of formal systems.
2. Chaitin’s book is a very rare example of “popular science from the horse’s mouth!” .. of an extremely accessible account from the very originator of the theory. (As an aside, wonder why Russians are so prolific in writing amazing popular science books … eg. Perelman and Gamow were my favourites when I was a kid, among many other memorable books and authors.)
3. And finally, right at the beginning of Chaitin’s book, there are three proofs for infinitely many primes. Read them, chew them, roll them in your head … and if you want to know if there is beauty in mathematics, look no further!