Disasters and Browsers

Posted On: 2016-05-12

Well here we are at the start of what was going to be a fairly comfortable day of work. It even looked as though we might be able to catch up on some of the serious backlog of stuff that has built up in the last two weeks ... but that all changed last night.

Last night we got a phone call from a friend who had fallen over and needed some help. How much help could someone who has fallen over possibly need? Not much you might think and that's what we were thinking as we drove over to the hospital to visit her.

But then we discovered that "fallen over" was something of an understatement. Our friend had actually fallen down the side of a hill, broken her ankle in three places, broken bones in one arm and broken the same shoulder as well.

She's now in hospital for at least six weeks and, while she is covered by insurance, there is not much coverage for loss of clients ... and being stuck in bed for 6 weeks and only able to use one hand means that she will lose clients. So now we're doing what we can to cover for her while she is out of action.

Fortunately there is some crossover between what we do and what she does so It should be fun ... not ... but you can't not help your friends and we've coped with challenges like this before.

So what would you do if you were suddenly confined to bed for six weeks and only had the use of one hand? How would you survive? I know that I've asked similar questions here before but have you ever bothered to stop and think the answers? How you would survive if disaster suddenly leaped up and bit you in the ass?

Have you got any contingency plans in place or are you just hoping that nothing that bad will ever happen to you? Maybe now is the time to spend a little time looking into the black and scary possibilities and looking for some possible work-arounds to help you when one of those nasty possibilities becomes a reality.

Vivaldi
If you're not into classical music then there's a good chance that you've not heard that name before but you might be hearing that name a lot more in the future.

Vivaldi was an Italian composer ... also known as the Red Monk because of his flaming red hair. He was born in 1678 and his music is well known. I'm not big on classical music but I do like some of the pieces he composed.

But what has that got to do with adult webmasters? Well a little culture never hurt anyone but there's more to this than just culture because Vivaldi is the name of a new web browser that is beginning to gain some traction.

I'm sure you will begin to understand where the name came from when I tell you that Vivaldi is a branch of the Opera browser and was developed by one of the co-founders of Opera.

Vivaldi ... the browser ... runs on Windows, Mac and Linux machines and development is currently focused on desktop applications so don't look for it in Android or iOS. So why is it so interesting? If you believe the blurb on the website then Vivaldi allows you to customize everything and it has at least one feature that other browsers don't have.

You can move the address bar to the bottom, you can move the tabs down there too. You can have all your tabs open or you can put them into groups and suspend a group till you need them. If you suspend a group of tabs they don't appear with your active tabs, so there is less clutter, and they don't put any load on the processor because they're not actually in use.

While they may be out of site and not stressing the processor you can quickly call them back when you need them.

If you're one of those crazy people who like to set up ... and use ... a whole bunch of unique keyboard shortcuts then Vivaldi will be your wet dream. If you prefer to use your mouse then Vivaldi allows you to use what it calls "mouse gestures" to do repetitive tasks.

And then there's what the designers call "web panels". It looks interesting.

The developer suggests that Vivaldi is on the verge of gaining even more traction and he suggests that the time is not far off when they will have 5 million users. Obviously that does not sound like much but that's the break-even point for the project and once they hit that point the development team of just 35 people will be expanded.

It sounds so interesting that, despite the fact my day is already ramping up from crazy to insane, I'm going to download Vivaldi and have a little play with it.

Maybe you guys should have a look at it too. And now I'm going to take a deep breath and jump into the rest of my day ... and hope I'm still coherent and functioning at the end of the day.