I’m a long-time Opera fan and flagwaver, but the pain of bugs in 9.5 beta finally forced me to switch to Firefox last week. I’ve been using 9.5 beta1 since the end of October. When do we get a new one? I see the weekly builds, but they’re all alphas (no thanks). The biggest problems I’ve had were with the rich text editor and Flash (which everyone incorrectly assumes to be a cross-browser development panacea), but, as a webdev, I’m now spoiled having instant access to Firebug.
Firefox now has closed tab access (though I miss ctrl-z) and session restore, but within a few minutes I had mouse gestures and wand back. This is petty, but a big reason I loved Opera is that it let me put the address bar, tabs and everything at the bottom. I haven’t found an easy way to do that in FF. FF is also noticeably slower in a lot of actions, but having everything actually work (including Google Docs) is really a breathe of fresh air.
I’ll continue to test Opera and give each beta/full release a whirl, but winning me back will require these to work:
- Rich text (“WYSIWYG”) editing in WordPress
- Switching songs in the MySpace music player
- Mvelopes
- NPR’s new music player
Instant access to Firebug is the one thing that kept me from flocking to the shiny blue glass buttons of Safari (oh yeah, I’m a Mac user now). With the release of Firefox 3 beta 3, I can have my shiny blue glass buttons in Firefox (I think its part of the chrome that FF brings along?), right on top of Firebug and all the other extensions I love.
The move from FF 2.0 to 3b3 meant living without a few extensions for a while, but they’re starting to support 3 beta a few at a time. YSlow is on board (with Firebug, of course), along with DownThemAll, PDF Download, and Web Developer. I’m still waiting for LastTab to support 3 beta for my tab-switching pleasure…
3 beta 4 was just released. DownThemAll, Firebug and Web Developer are all supported (YSlow doesn’t jive with 3b4). Also, 3b4 takes on the host OS’s chrome (so my shiny blue glass buttons are via Leopard). The chrome from Vista and Linux are supported along with XP and Mac OS X.
The Gestures nightly plugin supports FF 3b, and the Secure Login (Wand) production release claims compatibility with 3b5pre.
Welcome to the fold.