FireFox 3 has been a pain in the neck ever since I downloaded it. Please tell me I am not the only one.

I continually come across a nasty text rendering bug when using this browser. At first I expected to see this bug being written up all over the internet. But I never heard anyone else complain. So I threw up some screenshots of my issue on twitter, and came to find out that some other people did not have this issue with their install of FF3. So I completely removed FF3 and then re-downloaded it. Same problem.

What is the problem you ask? This:

This is what every single Google webpage looks like for me with FF3. Horrible. The kerning is completely messed up, the margins are all jacked up, and look at the links!!! Look at those underlines, unbelievable!

And it's not just Google:

CNN suffers here as well.


Even ThinkVitamin.com gets bitten by the bug.

Now the odd thing is that not all text shows up like this. Most websites show up completely normal. Like mine for example:

Nothing wrong with any of the text on my website at all. Shows up completely normal. And there are many other websites like this... Just look at the above screenshots. With the exception of Google, all the screenshots have text that shows up completely fine, with some text that is totally ruined by this bug.

So what's going on here? You got me. My guess is is has something to do with NOT applying enough CSS to the text. FF3 displays text horribly on my machines (Quad core G5 and an Intel Macbook Pro) by default. So if all you did was change the "color" in CSS, that wouldn't be enough and FF3 would force your text to look like crap. But if you applied a "font-size" property and a "margin"... FF3 would give in and decide to display your text like other normal browsers.

Even Mozilla themselves are not prone to this disease:

Yes, this is the kind of crap I deal with when using FF3.

All I can say is LONG LIVE SAFARI. In my personal opinion, I think every browser should be forcefully shut down, and Web Kit should be the browser we all use. Wouldn't that make things easier :)

Anyone else have this same problem with FireFox3?

Peace,
Drew

Hey everyone!

I have spent part of today witting my 2nd article for Vitamin. Thanks a ton to Adam for the invite :)

I am writing about Firebolt, CMSs, and my experience through the whole project. I know some of you will be reading it, so I wanted to throw out this question to you: What do you want to know?

Leave me a comment with something you would like to know. It can be business related, CMS related, design or development related. It just has to tie in with the Firebolt project.

Thanks so much everyone!

Peace,
Drew

Yep,

The pirates strike again. My old site's design has been ripped off, and the guy is a... freelance designer??? what!?
I think he should swap that title with SCAM ARTIST.

I would love to see someone design a site that is inspired by my work.. that would be awesome. By why do people have to straight copy it... they actually take the time to download every single one of my images (I have hotlink prevention), and every line of code.

Anyway, check out the thief here: http://www.livestudio.be/

He even has a blog post announcing "his" new re-design: http://www.livestudio.be/fr/index.php?newsid=5

To Jeremy the priate from livestudio.be: Try asking before stealing.

Thanks a ton to Colum for the heads up on this one :)

Someone needs to create a community site that exposes these types of crooks (like a css gallery), and the ENTIRE design community can know when this happens. Then these guys will "never work in this town again". lol

Peace,
Drew



*** UPDATE: The thief has taken the site down, that was quick! But it gets BETTER!! He put up a coming soon page, and on it there is a light blue gradient background... THAT IS MY BACKGROUND IMAGE for the Valio, inc. site!!!!!

Open up my Valio site in one tab and his coming soon page in another. Switch back and forth and you will see it is the SAME repeating image. This is hilarious!! This "freelance designer" lacks sooo much creativity he can't even make his own gradient from scratch... he has to go and download mine... unbelievable!!

This is a first, normally people tear down my stolen design, but this guys tears it down only to steal more of my images!!

To the Pirate Jeremy: Come on bro, you are better than this. Just open photoshop and have fun.

I recently got an email from Patrick McNeil from Design Meltdown letting me know that his new book "The Design Meltdown Book" is up for pre-sale.

Why am I telling you this? Because I am in it! :) On page 24 to be exact.

A big thanks to Patrick for putting my site in the book! The book has my old design in it, since it went to the publisher before I finished the current design on my site.

Check it out here: www.dmdthebook.com

And pre-order it if you are so inclined :)

Thanks everyone!

Peace,
Drew

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to pass along some code (PHP to be exact) to you all:

If ($time == “available”){
  switch ($meal) {
  case “breakfast”:
    echo "Party at my place!!!";
    break;
  case “lunch”:
    echo "Party at my place!!!";
    break;
  case “dinner”:
    echo "Party at my place!!!";
    break;
  }
} else {
  echo “Try again next week.”;
}

My buddy Nate Firth (also responsible for all my web hosting :) sent me this little script this morning. I thought it was super hilarious :) We have been trying to get some chill time for a while now, but we are both super busy with projects. I have been in my web design "cave" from 7am-10pm almost every day for the last month and a half. Trying to get stuff done.
I can't wait until June is over... I should have more free time then **crosses fingers.

Thanks again for the laugh Nate!

Hope you enjoy this script :) But in all seriousness, I will have some awesome javascript to share with you all once Firebolt is out. I have created a bunch of custom javascript for Firebolt, and lets just say my main inspiration was "Leopard". Yes, like Mac OS X. I love the new UI features in Leopard, so I wrote some javascript to bring similar functionality into Firebolt. So once I get some time (after the release) to package up the scripts... I will hand them over to you all :)

Remember to sign up for the Firebolt beta (released in a few weeks) if you haven't already: www.getfirebolt.com

Peace,
Drew

Not even close.

I randomly started thinking about this and spent a few minutes doing some basic research. Here is what I found.

First you need to define what is a comfortable amount of space for a person to live in. For this example I am using San Francisco. It's not the most densely populated city out there, but it does have a lot of people and they seem to enjoy living there (not me though... not a big city person).

In San Francisco the city (not the bay area) there are 764,976 people living there among all the businesses, hospitals, churches, etc. San Francisco the city is 48 sq. miles. So there are 16,000 people per sq. mile. Great, now we have some data to do some math with.

There are 6.6 billion people in the world today. Thats a lot.
Now divide 6.6 billion by 16,000. That will give you how many sq. miles it will take to hold all the people in the world with the same living conditions as San Fransisco.

You end up with 41,250 sq. miles. So what does that much space actually look like? Well, the 35th largest state in the USA is Ohio (that means it is pretty small compared to the other states :) Ohio is 41,330 sq. miles.

Thats right, the entire world's population can fit into the state of Ohio with the same living conditions as the city of San Francisco.

So no... the world is not over populated.

I am reminded of a road trip I took across the USA once. There is nobody living anywhere in the middle of the USA, only on the coasts is it really populated. The USA has SOO much empty space. And thats a good thing :) For instance the state of North Dakota has just 640,000 people. Alaska has 670,000 people. Both states have less people than the city of (not the whole county, just the city) San Diego... Combined!

I have been to many places around the globe as well, and found that there really is a lot of open space. Now of course some is desert, but that really does not have any impact on just how small amount of people live in the world today. It's crazy to me to think we can all fit in Ohio?! I have been to Ohio... that's crazy awesome :)

Just some random info for you all. Hope you enjoy!

Peace,
Drew

I just finished a new holder site for Firebolt. It gives you a sneak peek, as well as some feature descriptions.

Check it out: GetFirebolt.com

Peace,
Drew

If you haven't already signed up for Twitter... do it! I never had the desire to sign up, but I did... and it is actually fun :)

Check out my page here: http://twitter.com/drewwilson

I will update the blog soon, but I have just been beyond swamped lately... and still am... so I gotta get back to it.

Peace!

Drew