Like just about everyone else with an active TCP/IP stack, I grabbed a copy of Firefox 2.0 today. It feels much cleaner and faster than before, and the spelchecker is definitely welcome (making it feel more like a MacOSX browser, where all other browsers have had spelcheking for ages…)

As part of the upgrade, it grabbed new versions of my extensions, including Performancing. Poking around in the PFF 1.3 settings, I notice it’s got its own concept of plugins. Including one that takes any local images used in a blog post and hucks them into Flickr on demand. mwaaaAAH? I’ve just got to try that sucker. How about a screenshot of Firefox 2.0 with PFF 1.3? Here goes… command+3, then drag the resulting image into place and resize by dragging the corner widgets…

Update: It didn’t handle resizing as expected (or at all – no way to select one of the Flickr-generated sizes, only original), and using a 1280×854 screenshot inline in a blog entry would be evil. But it works. Cool. Dragging the image from Flickr directly into PFF solves the problem nicely.

And PFF seems to have lost all of the strange text rendering bugs I was seeing under Firefox 1.x.

Update 2: PFF still doesn’t seem to successfully set categories/tags on my Drupal site. Don’t know if that’s a problem with PFF or Drupal (or both). Not fatal, but inconvenient.

Update 3: How does the image FTP upload work?

Update 4: OK. I got categories working! Woohoo! The trick is to set Drupal to use the MetaWeblog API, and tell PFF to connect to a Drupal site. Seems to work like a charm.

Just testing out the latest build of the Performancing for Firefox extension – a fully-featured weblog manager built into Firefox. And it’s free.

I had to stop using it a while back because it was behaving oddly (character spacing in the text editor was wonky enough to make it unusable) but it’s behaving perfectly now. Not sure if it was the latest Firefox update, or a rogue extension, but whatever was causing the misbehaviour, it’s all good now.

It works with a whole bunch of weblog platforms. I’ve tested with Wordpress 2 and Drupal 4.7, and it claims to work with MovableType and many others.

The latest PFF build also has a few nice new features – like sorting categories, integrated Metrics display, and a nice del.icio.us bookmarking utility. Lots of other cool stuff, too. Definitely a handy extension. I’m looking forward to comparing it with Flock when the Cardinal build is released next month!

The Performancing extension for Firefox was just updated, and they added some great new stuff. It’s now tied into del.icio.us, and adds a “Page Tools” view that looks up the current web page in Technorati (handy, but no handier than a bookmarklet).

Firefox is still not quite as nice as Safari, so I don’t think I’ll be using it full time (page scrolling performance in Firefox is terrible on my ‘book, and text rendering isn’t quite as nice as in Safari). Maybe I’ll try it for a few days to see how it works out.

The beauty of keeping all bookmarks in del.icio.us is that it completely commoditizes the browser. My bookmarks are completely portable. The only links/tools that get left behind are the bookmarklets I keep in a browser’s bookmark toolbar, and those are easily replaced.

Two things that they could add to make Performancing rock harder would be:

1. Sorting categories. 285 categories and counting, and it’s hard to find specific categories for a post (where did “performancing” go in this unsorted mess?)
2. Category search. Even with sorting, it would be handy to be able to search/filter categories. Maybe it’s a tool that only shows up if a blog has more than 20 categories or something… It took me longer to find the categories for this post than to write it.

One thing that strikes me is just how much faster/easier/more flexible adding categories is through the WordPress web UI, when combined with the Cat2Tag plugin – it is a simple text entry field, similar to del.icio.us or Flickr, with autocompletion of existing categories and seamless creation of new ones as needed. It even provides a sorted and weighted tag cloud view of existing categories if desired. No idea if adding categories is even possible via the posting API, but it keeps me coming back to the WordPress posting UI…

Update: Disabling Firefox’s “live scrolling” makes it feel about 6 bajillion times faster. It’s totally usable now. I’ll try it for a week or so (again)…