Browser Joy
June 17th, 2008 | by Joe |Downloaded Firefox Three Point Oh this evening and I must say I’m impressed. Last check was a few beta revisions ago, and this is much improved in the one area I am most concerned with: stability. I have been running it all evening and she’s been perfectly stable so far.
PPK has posted a quick roundup of the current browser state of affairs today. Seems we have beta 2 of IE8 due out in August, which is good because I don’t want to deal with it until then. 
Of course Firefox 3 is out and looking fabulous, and a Firefox 3.1 alpha is now available with alleged full CSS3 selector support. Safari 4 is a developer preview, and Opera 9.5 is already live.
So the great news is, things are not stagnant - things are moving forward at a lovely clip. IE6 is soon to be ancient history - two revisions old - and the rest of the browser market is vibrant and embracing standards and innovating on coolness all around.
Gruber has noted that when you hit the Firefox 3 page you get a comparison with Safari if you’re on Mac, and other users seem to be getting the IE to FF comparison.
Most of my essential plugins are working great. There is a Firebug 1.1 beta available on the releases page if you’re missing that. ScribeFire and the del.icio.us plugins seem to be fine and really the del.icio.us plugin wins in the most improved category. Still no HTML Validator yet for Mac, but I’ll be watching the skies on that one…
OK back to to practicing…
5 Responses to “Browser Joy”
By J Lane on Jun 17, 2008 | Reply
I can only dream about the day that IE6 is, in fact, ancient history. Unfortunately one of the sites I’m involved with still has a 25% IE6 browser share. I weep every time I code something new just to have it completely fall apart in IE6.
I have a dream…
By Meitar on Jun 17, 2008 | Reply
I can’t get Firebug 1.1 beta working with Firefox 3 at all. It does seem to work fine in Firefox 2, though. Whenever I try to do anything in the console, it gives me the commandLine.evaluate FAILS message. Boo.
By Joe on Jun 18, 2008 | Reply
Only 25% on IE6 - that’s great! Only a couple of years ago we’d be seeing upwards of 80% to 90% on a lot of our sites, so this is a positive trend. Really, we can see the horizon approaching….
I am refraining from upgrading to Firefox 3 on my development machine until Firebug and the HTML Validator are working. I just saw that Heroku now supports Firefox 3, which was another potential big concern here. Very psyched that we can check that one off the list.
By Jason on Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
I’m pulling it down now, but frankly I only use Firefox for Firebug - Safari is just so much faster for day to day usage… unless I’m debugging stylesheets, in which case I have Firefox, Safari, and IE6 (on darwine) running at the same time :))
By Joe on Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
Safari is still my day-to-day default too, but I’m always up for considering a switch back.
For testing, I have begun remoting into a second machine (although a virtualized Windows instance would work too) with IETester installed to run layout tests between IE5.5, 6, 7, and IE8b1 lately. Very convenient for getting all the IE flavors debugged.