Oddly enough, there’s a quick and easy fix.

1. Open the Preferences window (Command+,).
2. Switch to the Security tab.
3. In the “Web content” section, uncheck Java. (But leave JavaScript checked!)
4. Close the Preferences dialog. Now tabs should no longer reload whenever you switch between them. You won’t be able to run Java applets embedded in web pages, though.

I’m guessing that the behavior is the result of a bug, and not some weird decision of Apple’s.

To fix it, just follow these steps:

1. Open a new tab and type about:config into the address bar.
2. Search for browser.urlbar.trimURLs
3. Double click on the browser.urlbar.trimURLs key to change its boolean value from true to false.
4. Close the tab and enjoy your unhidden URL protocols.

This is the second time in two versions Mozilla has made an unhelpful UI tweak. In Firefox 6 they added “domain highlighting,” which greys-out the URL text, while leaving the domain in darker lettering. Fortunately, it was just as easy to fix.

Unfortunately, phpMyAdmin often has trouble processing large files. Sometimes it takes so long for the process to run that it times out, or other times the upload quota is simply too low.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: split your SQL file into smaller chunks. Here’s a command you can use under Mac OS X or Linux to do it automatically:

split -l 5000 ./path/to/mysqldump.sql ./mysqldump/dbpart-

The split command takes a file and breaks it into multiple files. The -l 5000 part tells it to split the file every five thousand lines. (You can tweak this value to find a good medium between fewer files and larger sizes.) The next bit is the path to your file, and the next part is the path you want to save the output to. Files will be saved as whatever filename you specify (e.g. “dbpart-”) with an alphabetical letter combination appended.

Now you should be able to import your files one at a time through phpMyAdmin without issue.

Metro apps, from what I’ve heard, will be built with HTML5 and Silverlight rather than being native apps. This comes in handy, as Microsoft is fracturing their platform a bit. Some Windows 8 devices will run on Intel’s x86 architecture as before, but Microsoft plans for a lot of the new tablets to be ARM-based. That will create a lot of software incompatibility, as applications will need to be re-compiled for ARM processors. (So don’t buy an ARM-based computer if you want to run Photoshop on it…)

Now, we can probably assume that most people will spend a lot of time in Metro, right? It seems like a convenient tool for casual computing, and certainly better-suited for touch-enabled devices. If you need to look something up quickly, you boot your machine to the Metro interface, click on the Internet Explorer icon and head over to Wikipedia, right? That raises one very important question:

Can you replace Internet Explorer 10 with Firefox, Chrome or Opera? If Metro applications have to be written in HTML5 and Silverlight, the browsers would certainly need to be re-written, assuming that you can even build a browser with such limited tools. And will Microsoft even allow you to move that big IE tile off the primary screen?

I hope Microsoft addresses this, because it seems rather anti-competitive to me, with their large market share and all. A return to the dark days between the death of Netscape Navigator and the birth of Firefox, if you will. Web standards and browser innovation basically stagnated for a decade until the open source cavalry arrived.

Update: Apparently Microsoft has partially addressed this at the Build conference. Metro applications will be written with a new API called WinRT that will also be available in C++/C#/VB/etc.. So browsers will have to be rewritten for the new UI, but they won’t be excluded.

In short:

Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. In particular, Firefox 7′s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs.

Also, there are already some early mock-ups of what the UI in Firefox 8 might look like.

Firefox 7 is lean and fast [Nicholas Nethercote]

I find it annoying, though. It looks a bit weird, and it makes the path less visible, which is something I work with on a regular basis. If you’re like me and want to turn off the feature, here’s an easy way to do it:

1. Open a new tab and type about:config into the location bar
2. Search for browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled in the filter field. (It searches as you type.)
3. Double click on the browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled line to change the value from true to false.
4. Close the tab and enjoy your lack of domain highlighting.

Mozilla believes that the web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development. To make open web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and desktop alike, we need to keep pushing the envelope of the web to include — and in places exceed — the capabilities of the competing stacks in question.

Mozilla wants to develop new APIs that would allow web-based applications to access hardware such as USB, Bluetooth, cameras, SMS, NFC and telephony. These would, of course, have a “privilege” system to ensure that potentially malevolent applications wouldn’t be able to access the hardware without your consent.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Google, with Chrome OS, seems to be primarily interested in the development of cheap hardware that boots into a browser. Mozilla, on the other hand, is currently more focused on enhancing web applications to make that sort of device more viable. And some of the APIs would likely be implemented in full-featured mobile operating systems like Android and iOS sooner or later.

Boot to Gecko [wiki.mozilla.org]

That’s rather inconvenient, though. Wouldn’t it be easier if you had a nice OS X application that would let you minify your code right from your Mac? Enter Minimus, the app I just finished.

Minimus is a handy GUI frontend for the YUI Compressor. All you have to do is drag one or more files onto the dock icon, hit a button, and in seconds you will have minified copies.

It’s a free download, but if you like it, feel free to send me $5 or so with the in-app PayPal form.

The long wait has grated both on our own nerves and those of our awesome users. But while we have kept quiet publicly about what we are working on, it is because privately we have been striving to transform our products into something new and even more awesome: Espresso 2. We are extremely excited to finally be able to show you what we have been working on, as this release will be of interest to both CSSEdit and Espresso users.

An early preview, the “kaboom” release, is already available for testing and upgrade path information has been posted.

After including it in your page, and jQuery of course, you create an empty DOM element to hold the QR code (a DIV, for example) and then you just do something like this:

jquery('#somediv').qrcode("http://www.webmaster-source.com");

The plugin is available on GitHub, and is released by the author under an MIT license.

An alternative, for those of you who don’t mind using a third-party service—and prefer simply including an image rather than extra JavaScript—can use the wonderful Google Chart API.