Henry is nerdy

I don't really like to take sides in the browser wars. As a developer I like to build sites that work on all browsers and if I find a bug in any given browser I do go and attempt to track it down and fix it. Having said that I believe that at the moment Firefox 3 is both a superior browser to IE7 and Firefox 2 on the Windows platform for anyone who has more then 1GB of memory. If you have less then 1GB IE7 is probably still superior because it has a higher CPU usage while taking up less RAM.

Since Firefox 3 went into public beta I've been using it as my main browser and I've been anxiously awaiting Firefox 3 to be finished. I've been using it as my main cause I got fed up with Firefox 2 hitting 200MB of memory followed by ridiculous CPU usage which tended to require me to restart the browser every 2 hours because of how much of a heavy browser I am. So for the past couple months I've been dealing with Firefox 3 beta as my main browser with all it's glorious crashes, bugs, and other annoyances and yet for some reason I still felt it was better then using Firefox 2. Since it's been a month since the previous release I went digging into the development of it and since the Mozilla foundation is such a transparent organization (Open Source) I found out a lot.

Mozilla has a wiki which has a Firefox 3 page. The Mozilla development team has a weekly status meeting on Tuesdays which helps summarize the progress being made and the dev team puts out a daily build of the current code base of the browser which lets anyone try it out. You can also view the current status of bugs. The dev team refers to bugs as "blockers" because they block release. As of today there are only 12 blockers left to fix, only one of which is a critical bug and none of the ones left cause anything serious like a crash. This is a huge contrast to Beta 5 which when released on April 2nd had 140 blockers remaining (as of April 1st status meeting). This essentially means that in the month of time since then the development team has fixed probably more then 200 bugs (because other bugs creep up as old ones are fixed). I'm happy to say that I'm writing this blog on the daily build of Firefox as of April 2nd and I highly recommend you guys try it out. Beta 5 used to crash on me quite a bit but I'm happy to say that the current nightly build hasn't crashed on me at all so far and it looks very solid.

<a rel="lightbox[firefox]" href="http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/4163/minefield_may2.png"><img src="http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/4163/tn_minefield_may2.png"></a>;

If you wanna try the nightly build go to,
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

You can either run the install like normal or you can download the zip and copy the Firefox directory inside the zip to any folder on your hard drive. The nightly builds are called "Minefield" so don't be surprised when you open it up and you get a different icon from the familiar orange Firefox logo. This is done on purpose so you can tell the difference between an official release and an internal beta build.

It will automatically detect and attempt to use the profile you already have setup on your computer for Firefox so you might wanna make a backup of your profile by going into,
C:\Documents and Settings\{Your username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

Make a backup of the profile with the .default suffix.

You can also choose to make a copy of the profile and create a shortcut like so,
firefox.exe -profile "E:\path\to\my\profile\"
which will allow you to run multiple instances of the Firefox browser. Something that might come in handy for the developers.