i’ve been having a browser war lately. with myself. it has totally sucked because i’ve basically been losing, to myself. but not winning. don’t ask me how that works, because it sucks too much to tell you. basically it’s filled with spinning balls and hanging apps.

short story is this. firefox 2 suxorz bad. takes up like a gig of memory and thats when it’s doing well. i had to get off of it, but there are two extensions i can’t live without:

- firebug
- delicious

so i switched to safari 3.1 and installed the delicious plugin and was making due. but that was it, i was making due and no more.

so i was cautious to try firefox when it was in the beta 1 and 2 stages. i don’t know, something about beta 1 and 2 sounds too close to “this sucks and has a lot of bugs so try it.” i’m sure that’s not what it actually means, but that’s how it sounds to me. when firefox 3 beta 4 was released though, i couldn’t hold back anymore, the sick part of me that loves new software would not chill the eff out.

turned out it was pretty cool.

but i needed to get my extensions working.  at least the aforementioned two.  at least.  booyah lifehacker steps up with this post: Firefox 3 Beta: Make Your Extensions Work with the Firefox 3 Beta.  tweak out ur about:config and ur extensions are in FX.

or so i thought.

turns out the delicious plugin was only pretending to work, but behind the scenes it was firing blanks. bastard.  i lost a full day of delicious posts.

so it was back to safari 3.1 for a couple days.  then it arrived. the fifth – and rumored final – beta. i figured that i had nothing to lose since i wasn’t using beta 4 anyway, and installed it. the lifehacker hack carried over and my extensions were still in fx. this did not surprise me. but the ultimate test was tagging a post and seeing if the previously sterile delicious plugin was going to do me proud.

turns out it worked! nice! no serious issues to speak of. it’s def noticeably quicker on startup and it seems quicker overall. gmail is noticeably more nimble which is pretty rad.

so give beta 5 a shot if you feel so inclined. let me know if you think it’s a step in the right direction, or if i’m just totally full of nonsense. but remember, your browser recommendation needs to have a firebug-esque equivalent. that’s bullshit, actually. it has to have firebug.

an interesting postscript: while i was finishing putting this post together, wordpress 2.5 was released. which is really great and all, but the ‘so fresh and so clean’ image uploader crashes firefox 3 beta 5 hard. just spanks it closed. ugh.