Firefox 3 Gripes and Cheers
Firefox 2 seemed a godsend for a long while. After dealing with IE for so long, and remembering the bad old days when I preferred IE to NS, I was barely convinced I was an FF1 user before FF2 came out. Godsend or no, it has since worn heavy and slow on my desktop(s). This goes for all platforms. It just plain drags. I love it so, and tend to ignore the slow startup, the occasional slow rendering of pages, the somewhat more frequent memory leaks, the random crashes and inability to properly quit the application simply because it’s the Best with a capital B. It’s the Best for one reason: the plugins extensions.
Like WordPress, Firefox became the powerhouse in market share it is at this point because of the plugins extensions (and getting an early jump on the tabbed browsing trend didn’t hurt).
I’m currently writing this post from ScribeFire, a badass little plugin extension that allows me to post directly from the browser in a rich text editor without worrying whether I’m online or not. I use several other plugins extensions every day. Most notably of these, as a developer, is of course Firebug. While the source of some of the aforementioned memory leaks and random crashes/misbehavior, it’s well worth the cost for the benefits of a true debugging environment for my JavaScript, an unmatched HTML inspector and the best analysis-and-live-tweaking CSS toolset on the planet. Nothing else matches it, on any platform. Webkit has Web Inspector and Drosera, which are fine, I guess. IE has various JS consoles (including Firebug Lite and several bookmarklets you need not include in your pages), DebugBar and maybe one or two other commercial tools, but nothing with the integrated firepower of Firebug. I also rely heavily on Web Developer toolbar for quickly enabling/disabling JS/CSS and launching validation checks when I’m bug hunting.
More bitching and moaning after the jump!
