Tread lightly on the things of earth

I’d been slowly increasing my reliance on Mozilla Firefox alongside Camino, which has been my Mac web browser of choice for a long time now. FireFox plus Chris’ splendid Web Developer Extension is pretty compelling if you’re trying to master CSS techniques. But recent days’ official nightly Mac Firefox builds have been wonky.

(Official nightly Mac builds of Firefox and Camino are usually fine; they’re certainly effortless to grab using Reinhold’s FireFix and CaminoKnight, respectively.)

In the process of reverting to a nonwonky Firefox build, today I notice that Martin (MMx2000) provides the occasional unofficial nightly build. I’m using Martin’s firefox-mac-TRUNK-2004-06-05 at this moment, and it seems wicked fast relative to the official build. Wow.

Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Martin.

2004-08-14 update:
Firefox wonkiness resolved altogether, and by wonkiness I mean its window layering kept getting confused and its text fields seemed to randomly stop accepting text. I don’t know how many times I tossed my preferences and started new.

Turns out the problem began with the release of Firefox 0.9, and the conflict is with Codetek Virtual Desktop Pro (v3.1, current). Quit CVD and the Firefox problems go away.

The bind, of course: I don’t want to live without Firefox, nor can I, given my workflow, live without virtual desktops. Here’s what I thought was the stopgap solution — Desktop Manager, the GPL’d free virtual desktop alternative for OS X (DM v0.5.2rc2 at this writing). But now, 48 hours of using DM later — with its associated Firefox (and Thunderbird) hassle-free operation — I’m prepared to say DM is not just acceptable, it’s awesome.

Which is what I also said, to my surprise, about Quicksilver. Once again, the Free Software alternative to a superb commercial utility meets or exceeds the commercial utility in quality and usability IMO (free DM meets commercial CVD, free Quicksilver meets commercial LaunchBar). The commercial versions are groundbreaking and I give their authors full credit for originality and ingenuity (and have given full price, BTW). But given a choice, I’ll usually choose, use, and promote the Free Software version, not because I’m a cheapskate, but because I want infrastructural software to be available to everyone.

I’m not sure it’s fair but it is where I’m at.