A look at Firefox 3

This morning I installed the second beta of Firefox 3 on my Mac Mini (per John Resig’s instructions, including the multiple Firefoxes part) and dang, it’s fast! Much faster than Firefox 2, and it’s especially noticeable in apps like Gmail and Google Reader. Heck, I hadn’t even realized FF2 had gotten that slow — I just assumed that’s how things were — but this is snappy. And they finally have native widgets on the Mac, instead of those horribly ugly grey boxes! It’s beautiful. I should also mention that the new Proto theme is delicious. In fact, I think it’s the best web browser look I’ve ever seen, bar none.

Originally I was planning to run both browsers side-by-side for a while, but unless I run into any big stability issues, I think I’m going to ditch FF2 and bask in the light of this sleek new star in my sky.

In other but related news, I recently ran across Allan Jardine’s Design toolkit. It’s a JavaScript bookmarklet that lets you overlay a grid over a webpage, display rulers on a page, measure distances, and it’s even got a crosshair. It’s brilliant and I can already tell that it’s going to help a lot with web design. This, combined with Firebug, has revolutionized the way I make websites. Or at least made it a heck of a lot easier than it used to be.

I love early Christmases… :)

One problem, though — italics aren’t showing up, at least on my blog. How weird.

I haven’t tried Firefox 3 yet because my G4 iMac is so old it probably wouldn’t show a difference, but if the man with the purse strings opens them this Christmas and there’s a really big box from Apple under the tree, I’ll be all over this.
I stopped using Firefox a couple of weeks after 2 came out. The painful slowdown from 1.5 was killing me, and I’ve been a Safari fan ever since (to the annoyance of my Firefox friends). Safari just pops up so fast, it’s so sleek. If FF3 returns to a much faster code, I’ll be back (maybe).

Is this this perhaps why I can’t seem to open your blog in Mozilla yet have no trouble in Explorer? Drat.

Oh, I didn’t see that you’d written about Design. I’m so in love with that. Who are these people smart enough to make these things?

Okay, FF3 beta2 has been a complete failure for me so far. The first time I tried to use it, the computer froze. The second time, it bounced on my dock for a good minute without opening. It didn’t get a third try. I’ll give it another try on a fresh Mac, but until then, Safari 3 beta works great.

M: That’s too sad. But Safari’s good, too, and I agree, it’s quite fast. (I use it in a separate Space for Facebook and my homework. It’s definitely faster than Firefox 2 ever was.) The only downside is that you don’t get the cool extensions like Firebug and Design. And I agree, they’re brilliant.

e: (We already resolved this via e-mail, but I’ll explain the fix here in case anyone else has the same problem.) When my blog went down for maintenance the other day, anyone who accessed it via Firefox would end up with a cached version of the site which didn’t work. So if you get the blank screen o’ death, you have to clear the cache and all will work just dandy again.

Design? Design works fine in Safari. Just drag it up to the bookmarks and launch it as a bookmarklet.

Duh, Ben. Of course. :) I guess I just got used to thinking of all those sorts of things as Firefox extensions. ~sigh~

Extension-ability was what I loved about Firefox, until the code became too heavy and even my happy v1.5 was chugging along like an over-burdened steam engine. And then Safari breezed through like a TGV, and I realized that I value that Apple sleekness over the open-source hackery.

If we take Firefox out of the picture, then I’m the same way. That’s why I switched to Mac after eight years of Linux. (Eight years of recompiling the kernel and trying to deal with mismatched hardware and suffering through ill-designed interfaces, I might add. :P) Not to bash Linux too much, of course, and I certainly prefer it to Windows, but it’s nice having a beautiful UI. OS X takes the cake. Not to mention that I use Photoshop and InDesign pretty much every day. (I do use the GIMP on my PC at work and yes, it has the functionality, but the interface is still awkward and nowhere near as smooth as Photoshop.)