Firefox 3
I downloaded Firefox 3 this morning and it is pretty cool - for a browser.
Faster, lighter, it has finally become a real live boy Mac application.
It’s so good… I’m going to switch to it (from Camino).
It’s been a while since I’ve done a browser switch. But every few years one seems to happen and each time for different reasons.
The last switch I did was from Firefox to Camino. The reason for this was that my Powerbook wasn’t coping too well with Flash animation (why do PowerPC Macs totally choke on Flash?), and there wasn’t a Flash blocking extension for Firefox that ran on Mac OS X at the time. Also the UI in Camino was native Aqua which made it feel more integrated to the rest of the OS. It also wasn’t the resource hog that Firefox was.
But then the Firefox 3 betas started coming out, and I could feel myself being attracted to the little Red Panda again.
Why go back to the Fox?
- It now uses Aqua (the native UI on Mac - the reason I moved to Camino)
- It is faster and uses less memory (the reason I moved to Camino)
- Google Gears is now properly implemented on the Mac (I’ve been shifting all my applications into “the cloud” so that I can work from anywhere using any computer)
- Weave is Mozilla’s new cloud computing initiaitve, it will be interesting to see what they come up with on this front.
- Add-ons - Camino has many of the basic extensions built in that I’d install with Firefox, but lately there have been some great ones that suit my online habits, and I’d like to take advantage of them
- Prism - I can see myself using this to cobble together my own mashups
All of this is aligned with my personal mantra of accessible information. By putting all my information “in the cloud” its available from any machine connected to the internet. And for the applications that use Google Gears it is even available when I am offline. All my work is version controlled and backed up for me automatically saving me the hassle of setting up backup schedules, archiving and offsite storage - not to mention the costs of all these too.
There is a bad side to keeping everything in the cloud; when the connection to the net goes down (and not everything is hooked into Google Gears just yet), its like being locked out of the office.
Hang on, is that so bad?
