It makes me sad. I loved the idea of Firefox, and I'm in debt to the developers in a round-about way as their once-upon-a-time best-of-breed browser helped me become a better web architect.
But now... now I'm seething. This is a small shop making over $70 Million a year, and their software crashes several times a day. I just can't take the risk anymore: I find I've been doing things in Firefox half-expecting it'll crash and I'll be able to recover from a page reload. But that's often not the case, and anyway isn't this supposed to be the Future? I don't need the Windows 98 flashbacks.
Guys (and Mitchell) - why the hate? I always loved you, I beta-tested your browsers since pre-1.0, I fought the good fight inside major corporations for your acceptance back when you were poor... and now this-- this rat-faced crashtopia.
On the bright side:
- Firebug's Joe Hewitt works for Facebook and is hopefully getting rich, one of the few to deserve it.
- Yahoo is hiring a Firebug developer, and this has Job Security written all over it.
- Safari is significantly outpacing Firefox in new browser development.
- Opera is back from the (comfy Euro-)grave with an interesting JS debugger.
- Firefox 2 with Firebug on Windows XP is still stable enough I can do all my WinXP sanity-checking there (except for MSIE of course, for which I need to consult the Quirksmode Oracle every ten seconds).
So now I find myself trying to readjust to Safari as my primary browser, since Firefox is so unreliable. And I like it fine, but for two things that have always bugged me, and for which I believe I have fixes.
First, I don't like that Safari doesn't tell me the URL of a link I'm about to click on. I guess Apple must have asked around and found people generally don't care. But I'm just geek enough to care, so I'm going to make it do that again.
Second, I think Apple made a horrific (and uncharacteristic) usability mistake when they decided that command-1 through command-0 (10) would open the cardinal bookmarks in the current tab, instead of doing what every other power application does and switch among the first 10 tabs.
I already fixed that in Tiger, so it's not a big deal. But I remain slightly frustrated that Apple still doesn't quite get tabbed browsing. I'll be sure to post the fixes back here; and Apple, my dear, if you disagree on the tab navigation item then bring it on, I love you but I'll kick your ass on this one.
That's all for now, I have another hour of playing with KeyNote before I can crash in my own right.
The palaver is (temporarily) finished.
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