Walking on the nightly side
I’ve stopped using Firefox 2. It’s been breaking with point releases, has problems with OS X 10.5, and just hasn’t been feeling all that stable to me.
Firefox 3, on the other hand, has some great new features, such as:
- Native-looking widgets on Mac
- Smarter password management
- Fixes for lots of little bugs1
- Total overhaul of graphics engine2
- Full page zoom
- Cool developer features like improvements to CSS3, Javascript 1.8, offline apps, and SVG support
- Memory usage improvements.
Unfortunately, Firefox 3 won’t be out for months now. Fortunately, after a year of development, their nightly builds are now fairly stable. Of course, using nightly builds of an application you use for hours each day has its risks. They use the application name “Minefield” instead of Firefox to discourage newbs from finding it and thinking they’ve downloaded a polished piece of software.
Some people think I’m crazy for using Firefox nightlies3. Through it, though, I’ve been able to participate in a minor way to the Firefox development effort through Bugzilla and developers’ blogs. In the end, the more I understand a piece of software, the more I’m comfortable using the bleeding edge. It’s fun getting a slightly improved version of your browser every night.
- Like the one that comes up when you click on a PDF link and click OK to open it in Preview. In Firefox 2 it will switch focus to the opened file in Preview, but Firefox will start bouncing in the dock to tell you that the file finished downloading. That was driving me mental. [↩]
- One result is that scrolling the transparent footer on antipode.ca now takes half the CPU it did with Firefox 2. [↩]
- I’ve used them on and off before most major releases since around version 0.6. [↩]
Nov 4 2007
9:22 am
I don’t think you’re crazy for using Firefox nightlies, Allen: I think you’re crazy for ever using Firefox on the Mac (except for when you really need to debug something). It’s slow to launch, slow to browse, has non-standard behavior everywhere, and just reeks of Windows-ish-ness.
I think you’d be much happier adopting it as a development-only browser.
Nov 4 2007
11:37 pm
I think I might try going back to Safari for a week when I install 10.5. The lack of certain features in Safari 2 tends to bug me (such as Find as You Type) but Safari 3 should be worth a try.
Nov 4 2007
11:40 pm
Interestingly, Safari 2 takes 3x the CPU to scroll my site up and down than Firefox 3 does! I’ll be interested to see how 10.5′s Safari holds up to my arbitrary tests.
Nov 5 2007
8:09 am
As a data point, your page took 23 seconds to load under Firefox on my PowerBook. Most of that was spent with the spinning wait cursor.
Safari took about 4 seconds. I say “about” because it didn’t trigger anything so I just had to count it.
Nov 5 2007
10:44 am
Fascinating. On my machine at school, antipode.ca’s cacheless load time is almost entirely network-bound on both Safari 2 and Firefox 3. I would say it’s about 2.5 seconds each. I should do some actual measurements during my Safari 3 trial.
Nov 6 2007
10:53 pm
I don’t know if you are aware, but your floating footer doesn’t work on the iPod touch (and probably ylthe iPhone). I’ll show you next time you’re out.
Nov 6 2007
11:51 pm
This isn’t surprising, but I’d be interested to see what it does instead.
Nov 7 2007
6:25 am
It basically acts as if the ipod doesn’t scroll. It never moves when I scroll, but does move when I flip the screen, so it is always interfering with article. Imagine printing the article to PDF exactly as it appears on screen with a small screen and you basically have it.
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Jan 2 2008
5:13 pm
[...] week ago1, I decided to give Safari 3 a shot at becoming my primary browser, as I had planned. As great as Firefox 3 is, a lot of people love Safari a lot, and Firefox does have some rough [...]