If my first 20 minutes of Firefox 3 beta 2 usage are any indication it’s much faster than 2.0.0.11. That said, I won’t be switching until a number of my Firefox addins are supported. Anyway, one thing is for sure and that’s that my blog loads significantly faster.

If you haven’t had a peek it might be work a look. It doesn’t appear to mess with your existing 2.0 install so it (seems) safe though I haven’t tried uninstalling yet.

Btw, Merry Christmas!

I hadn't updated my list of FireFox add-ons for quite awhile and with the release of Yahoo's YSlow for Firebug and my recent excursion into Selenium I decided it was time to refresh my list and at the same time I've moved it to my wiki so it will have a history of changes. After using YSlow I made a number of changes to my blog to improve load time as well so hopefully you'll notice at least some slight improvement.

Anything I'm missing?

I've blogged before about the sessionsaver add-on for Firefox but I didn't mention one of it's best features called SnapBack Tab. Basically, it's a menu item that gets added to the tools menu with a popup that contains a list of the last 10 tabs that you've closed. So, if you've accidently closed a tab all you need to do is select Tools|SnapBack Tab|a) <tab name> and voila your tab is back with it's entire browse history and everything.

In case you missed it, here is a post that lists my favorite Firefox extentions.

My favorite addin for Firefox is SessionSaver which saves/restores all of your browser tabs (among other things) each time you shut down the browser so you can easily pick up where you left off. Firefox 2.0 added a similar feature but lands far short of the usefulness of SessionSaver. Ever since I upgraded to 2.0 I've been watching to see SessionSaver would be updated but I hadn't found anything until I read through all of the comments on the here. There is a patch for SessionSaver available allowing it to work in FF 2.0. It's a good thing because I've been considering moving back to FF 1.5 just to get SessionSaver back.

Have you ever spent time and in some case a considerable amount of typing an email or any paragraph of text for that matter in an HTML memo field only to click submit and be greeted with an error page. You tap the back button to return to the form you just submitted and find your memo text is blank! In my case, the simple one line edit fields still have their submitted value but the memo field(s) are blank. That kills me.

My new blog engine, DasBlog, suffers from this very problem. I login, add a new entry, get called away, return to finish up and click "Post to weblog". I'm greeted with an error page stating something like "You cannot access this page" as a result of my login session timing out. Someone has already logged a bug on the duration of the login session for DasBlog being too short here. But to me the killer problem is the loss of my content. At the very least, I'd expect the error page to include a memo that contains the text of my blog entry and a label reading "BEFORE YOU LOSE ALL THIS TEXT COPY THE FOLLOWING MEMO TO THE CLIPBOARD".

I know this isn't really a DasBlog problem and I think web browsers really should have some built-in mechanism to deal with this situation generically. Perhaps there is some FireFox extention that does this and if so, I'd love to hear about it.

Btw, while writing this entry I was called away twice.

I'm a long time fan of Mozilla FireFox and I've recently added a list of the extensions I use the most on the right-hand column of my blog. I'd be interested to hear what other extensions people find useful. Probably the one single extension I can't do without is SessionSaver.

Mozilla's Firefox browser is officially 1.0! Congratulations!

Now that the 1.0 preview release of Firefox is out I just gotta say again how nice it is to have a browser that keeps getting better and better.  Some of the new features that I really like are incremental search and the highlighting of the address bar when you browse to a secure site.  Firefox has really made me look forward to getting each new release.  My thanks go out to everyone who works to make Firefox the great application that it is today.