Abe Vigoda, still kickin' in FireFox 1.5

Published 2005-12-01    Printer-friendly version

Yesterday, while browsing Google News, I noticed FireFox 1.5 had been released, something FireFox itself neglected to tell me. Using my favorite FireFox feature, I opened one of the links in a new tab, and...FireFox crashed. I started FireFox again, clicked on the little FireFox home page icon (I'm hoping someone, somewhere can push the envelope and make that icon just a bit more obscure), and got a page that showed absolutely nothing about 1.5. So I manually changed http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/central/ to http://www.mozilla.com/firefox, which is where I found the download. The install went smoothly, something I worried about just a little because I have all of my FireFox configuration settings in a non-standard directory, to make it easier (in my mind, anyway) to transfer my favorites etc to/from my laptop.

I really can't see much difference between 1.0.7 and 1.5, except that so far I haven't encountered any crashes (I guess I can call this FireFix 1.5), and a couple of my extensions stopped working. Happily, Abe Vigoda Status made it through.

You probably remember Abe Vigoda as Detective Sgt. Fish on the show Barney Miller. As a kid I was convinced Barney Miller was a Canadian show because of the dry humor and the lousy production values. At the time Abe looked, to me at least, to be in his 70s, but was in fact about 20 years younger. I guess he looked old to everyone else too, because in 1982 People magazine announced Vigoda had gone to the big squad room in the sky. As with that other funny guy, Mark Twain, the reports of Vigoda's death were greatly exaggerated, and Abe even posed in a coffin reading a copy of that issue of People.

Abe Vigoda Status is a little FireFox extension by Bob Vesterman at Vesterman.com ("Serving all of your Vesterman needs since 1999"). The extension periodically polls some server out there in the cloud for Abe's situation, and displays this in the status bar. Earlier versions just showed the word "alive"; the current version also displays a tiny, but nonetheless flattering, picture of Abe. You can click on the status bar for more options, including Abe's Wikipedia entry.

I realize a few people think this extension is in bad taste. I can only imagine that Abe Vigoda thinks it's a hoot. And I hope to see that word "alive" on my status bar for many years to come.

Crossposted at Clarion Magazine

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