I know it's a beta, but c'mon...

In addition to crashing a few times a day, Firefox 3.5b4 has this cool overlapping button feature on its "fail whale" page:

HOWTO: Enable Firefox 3.0 extensions in Firefox 3.5 for great justice

Just updated to Fedora 11, and with it Firefox 3.5b4. Sadly, that meant most of my extensions (including mouse gestures!) no longer worked... until I found this:

In A.D. 2009,
Firefox 3.5 was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Fedora 11 repo set up us the beta.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main browser turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
FF35: How are you gentlemen !!
FF35: All your extensions are belong to 3.0.
FF35: You are on the way a vanilla Firefox.
Captain: What you say !!
FF35: You have no chance to survive wait for GA.
FF35: Ha ha ha ha....
Operator: Captain !! *
Captain: To put back every 'extension'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Install this.
Captain: For great justice.

Captain's Log - Additional: Here's the same extension for Thunderbird 3.0b2, though I had to disable the quicksearch toolbar box as it wouldn't close properly in TB3; also found some handy toolbar buttons here for filtering a mailbox for all/unread.

A Week Without Firefox

Last week I fired the Fox and switched to using Opera 9.6. Today, I'm back to Firefox 3.0 because while Opera has a few nice features, it ultimately lags behind FF (for me, anyway) in usability and functionality.

Here's how they stack up:

Opera 9.6's Pros

1. Sidebar notepad feature
2. Speed dial homepage
3. Minimalist UI with sidebar (incl. a handy notepad app and the usual suspects (transfers/downloads, history, bookmarks). For web dev, there's some handy extras like Links (a list of all the links in a page) & Info (page metadata)... but then FF also provides these via a different UI
4. Ability to do "g keyword keyword2" to search Google for those keyword(s) (Firefox just does this without the "g")
5. Mouse gestures
6. Single "Wand" password manager login for entire session (rather than per-window - see Firefox Cons below)

Firefox Pros

1. Awesomebar searches within history allow minimal typing like "hu ec ve l ar" to pull up a long URL like https://build.eclipse.org/hudson/view/Athena%20CBI/job/cbi-ve-1.4.x-Ganymede/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/
2. Ability to create keyword associations for bookmarks, so that "b 272403" will load https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=272403
3. Tons of plugins/extensions, including: mouse gestures, Twitter, Delicious, Tab colouring & detach/merge, ...

Opera Cons

1. Location bar only works with URLs and sometimes page names. Way more typing needed than in FF
2. No ability to undo the closing of a tab
3. Cannot reproduce FF extensions in Opera; Delicious and Twitter integration are not nearly as good; no tab colouration, single view of downloads, no Tasktop support.
4. Cannot store username/password pairs for in-page login forms (only browser-level ones). Repeatedly having to log in to JBoss Hudson every few hours is a royal pain.
5. Crashes unexpectedly but previous session can be recovered.
6. Lame icon with a dropshadow. Retro, sure, but c'mon, they've had that for AGES, and it's just lame.

Firefox Cons

1. Memory bloat
2. Crashes unexpectedly but previous session can be recovered.
3. When reloading a saved/crashed session, every single page requiring access to the password manager pops a login dialog; sometimes I get to enter my password 7 or 8 times, or hit ESC repeatedly to lose those tabs.

I also briefly tried Firefox 3.1beta4, but as none of my extensions work there yet, it's not much better than Opera at this point. It's supposed to be better on memory, and has new bells and whistles being added to the Awesomebar. It's also supposed to be implementing a lot of functionality I get now from the above extensions, such as better tab management.

So, ultimately, I'm back to Firefox 3.0.10.

Do you wanna be open source?

I've got a plan to make code free and open,
Lucky for me, for you it's a cause you can join,
The world is slowly changing,
FLOSS is so contagious

Chorus
I'm willing to code my way to the top,
I wanna be o-pen source,
I don't wanna stick with vendor lock-in,
I wanna be open source

I must confess,
Lin's got too many distros,
Been sleepin around,
Talk of the town,
My name is...

E-clipseCon will beckon,
E-veryone will listen,
Play my vimeo
Check me out on ohloh,
Browsin' through the source, yo
No one ever says no

Chorus

I'm willing to code my way to the top,
I'm a contributor
I'll submit patches, write docs, and test stuff
Make me a committer

My friends... are all... sans Windows
My friends... they all... pronounce the 'g'

I just fixed a bug!

Play my vimeo
Check me out on ohloh,
Browsin' through the source, yo
no one ever says no

Chorus

I'll collaborate my way to the top,
I'm a beta-tester
I'll report problems and suggest features
Help to make better software

Freedom... comes when... the source is free
Freedom... thanks to... community

Play my vimeo, check me out on ohloh
I'm willing to code my way to the top
Browsin' through the source, yo, no one ever says no
I wanna be o-pen source
x2

Are you willing to code your way to the top?
Do you want to be o-pen source?

Darren Hayes - Popular