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Firefox 4, A Day Later
Yesterday we noted that Firefox 4 is out in the wild. Since then, the popular browser has been downloaded 6 million times, double the numbers reported for MSIE9. Now the development team is talking about a new development process and what to expect for FF 5 and 6. And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while Firefox will die.
People keep saying this, but I just loaded the new Firefox and it feels to me like the interface is much more responsive and flash-intensive pages that used to take forever to load now show up extremely rapidly. I was sticking with FF3 because of the great plugins, but FF4 actually seems to be pretty decent out of the box.
Why anyone would want to use the closed / proprietary version (with Google's late-night secret sauce added), when there's a clean open source version available is beyond me.
By the Chromium team's own admission, there is no such thing as a "stable release" of Chromium. And they don't seem interested in making it so. Basically, you download top-of-tree and build it. Sorry, I don't use stuff like that for daily work.
When I download software, open source or not, I tend to want it in binary form. At least then I have a hope in hell that maybe the thing has been tested somewhat. Open source developers are way too squishy with this kind of thing. "The latest stable is 1.2.3, go get it and build." Uh, no. The latest stable is some particular binary that YOU built and YOU tested and YOU found to be adequate. My compiler might (very well may be) different. My dependencies may be different. My system is certainly different. This is not the definition of "testing" or "stable." Build a binary, test it on a variety of environments, bless it, and put it out there. You CAN be open source and professional at the same time.