yea, the ticket queue sits in a tab in FF. Same with the websites I monitor. I guess I could write a windows app to do it....when it boils down to it, I'm just watching some database tables. My winforms programming skills aren't as far developed as my web page ones. Regarding the programming tutorial/manual type stuff, what I have open depends. For like PHP and C# I'll have it open to esoteric stuff I won't memorize... like the date() function in PHP with what letter stands for what output, for instance, or I'll bring up substr or strpos or something to remember the order the arguments go in. I use a text editor instead of an IDE... I don't know if Eclipse has a auto-complete/intellisense plugin for PHP... I guess if it did I'd need to look stuff up much less often.

C# is different...well, maybe. For web-based C#, it's similar stuff... the things I look up the most often are string formating (.toString()), letters and such similar to php date() in that committing them to memory just isn't worth it. But I'm also learning other stuff a lot, so it may be open to other things. My most recent foray is into directx programming in C#... so for that I'll have a tutorial open and probably another tab or two for other resources. Just manually doing what a tutorial says is no fun... I need to twist and tweak it to do something interesting, which invariably causes it not too compile, hence I'm looking up the objects and stuff....

Blah...anyway....you get the point. I could supplement the large number of tabs open with bookmarks and just opening them when I specifically need them, I guess. But having them already open and swapping tabs is easier and more natural for me. I'd rather not adapt my working habits to account for the leakiness of the browser.

Certainly, it is made to serve to you, not vice versa. I presented the things from my corner: I've never experienced FF's leakiness in the first place since I depend on it only so long as I finish some active (that requires my presence) job. No passive jobs on FF's side.

Just for the records: you wouldn't need much knowledge of windows GUI to make a program that uses wget to download web pages, parse them and pop up a message box, a a balloon message or a new FF tab when it find something interesting.

yea, actually I did that today. I wrote a winform that sits in the systray... it autominimizes and doesn't allow maximizing. It then runs a query against the db every few seconds and if it comes back that there's something new it starts flashing. Double click it and it launches the web page. Nothing especially hard (though I'm such a winform noob it still took me a few hours). But it seems to work fine after some testing. I'll probably run both together for a few days to verify it works the way I expect it to, then I can lose the FF tab.

Flashing.. ? You mean blinking? If yes, I must note it is not always predictable effect on windows.

yea, blinking. The way I do it is I start a timer and just change the notifyIcon from my icon to a transparent one, then back again every 500 milliseconds. Alternately I could just change the icon, or play around with balloons.

I still prefer message boxes. Hard to hide, fail-safe to display, and it can have button "open this page in browser".

well, a messagebox takes focus, which is extremely annoying. The balloon works well... I haven't missed it yet. And despite the timeout settings I've never had a balloontip time out on its own... I always have to hit x to get it to go away.

If you're sitting there the whole day, then yes. You could make it switch modes, depending on your presence. By the way, you can replace raw message box with a window that's not taking focus but looks exactly the same way. C# should have that somewhere.

Anyway i got a chance to try the Chrome. Somehow and for some unknown reason the IE in my bro's wife computer managed to corrupt to the core. I tried to fix it for 9hours, uninstalling and installing and i was really close to busting some caps into that laptop, and eventually it still failed to run. At first i couldnt even access windows update, then somehow a miracle happened and i managed to even install SP3 and even then it failed to run properly, crashing and hanging all the time.

By that time i didnt want to go for a format and gave up, installed chrome, works like a charm. Didnt help to solve the problem but sure as hell helped to ignore it. Chrome ran really well, i liked the clean interface, might even download it for myself too.

Fu*k IE. die motherfu**er.

hey, check out Iron. Someone took the source code of Chrome and got rid of all the crap that google has in there to track your surfing habits. Probably a better bet for real usage.

http://www.srware.net/software_srware_iron.php

Page is in German, but I think the browser still has localized language settings. I don't see why it wouldn't, at least.