It’s been a couple of days now, since I first installed FireFox 0.9 and it’s been an interesting journey. Pete convinced me months ago to switch to FireFox and I have been a devoted Firebird/FireFox user since then. The last version on my machine was 0.8 and I was very happy with the stability of that release.

After my initial experiments with FireFox, I had made it my default browser and I have been very happy with it. The idea of browsing with tabs is just amazing and it’s one of those things where you don’t know how you go along with it. Plus I loved all of the extensions that were available to enhance your browsing and development experience. I spend a lot of time developing web applications and I use The Web Developer extension by Chris Pederick and Live HTTP Headers by Daniel Savard extensively. Another extension that made life incredibly easy was the IE View extension by Paul Roub that adds a ‘View page in Internet Explorer’ links to the content and link context menu. Really handing for consuming those IE only sites.

I have now been using FireFox 0.9 and I have had several stability issues that are making me wonder if I should go back to 0.8. The first issue was really bizarre where I couldn’t even open FireFox under Windows 2000. Browsing the support site led me to a ‘before-you-ask-read-this’ page, which recommended starting FireFox from the command line with a -p switch that would invoke the FireFox profile manager. I deleted my old profile, created a new one and then everything seemed to work. On my other machine that’s running Windows XP, FireFox was a completely different story. I would double-click the icon and FireFox would start up and then exit and then start up again. I watched this for a few minutes via the Task Manager before killing the process and deleting my profile. I also had to uninstall the older 0.8 version before FireFox would start up.

In my limited time of running FireFox 0.9, I see some major improvements over 0.8 but the new features have brought some new instability with them. 0.8 was rock solid and I can’t say that about the latest release. Some of the things that I love in this new release are the new extensions manager, the new theme manager and the new built-in update manager. Once some of the initial issues are worked out, I’m sure the 0.9 release will be better than the previous release. Kudos to the Mozilla FireFox development team and I cannot wait for the official 1.0 release. Microsoft has pretty much given up on IE and I hope FireFox is a wakeup call, as people aren’t going to wait around for Longhorn, which may or may not arrive in 2006. Just saw this on BetaNews where Microsoft has assigned Dave Massy, a technology evangelist at Microsoft to promote IE. Let’s call this the Mozilla effect

If you’ve installed any of the release candidates of Windows XP SP2 on your computer and just purchased the Linksys Bluetooth USB adapter, don’t install the included software. Instead of my usual ‘just-plug-in-device-any-see-what-happens’ approach, I read the included instruction and tried to install the software. I got a BSoD in the middle of the install and had to reboot. Upon reboot, I discovered that the installer or SP2 had deleted some system files and I couldn’t even get into my machine. Safe mode or any other mode won’t work and I am trying to find my XP install CD to repair my current installation. Yikes!

Update: Phew!! Thank God for System Restore in XP – I was able to use my install CD to boot up off the harddrive and then run System Restore to get back my machine.

Chris just pointed this out to me on Apple’s website and I want it. I want to iPod my BMW, but alas I own a 2001 BMW 330i.

I have been one of the lucky ones that have had a Google GMail account with 1 GB of space for a while now. Every few weeks, GMail allows me to invite a friend to join GMail and I just got 3 new invites to send. The first 3 people to leave me a comment for this blog will get the invites. If you see more than 3 comments, don’t bother as the invites are probably gone. Go –

Update: As you can probably imagine, all the invites are gone. Keep checking back and I’ll keep posting free invites here, when I get them from GMail.

Looks like Hani is getting some competition. Just stumbled upon the causticTech blog via Scobble and I am still laughing. You have to start from the bottom and work your way up to the top and read all the entries. Hani’s been a little tame lately – Maybe a little competition will do him good and we can expect some timely and tasty bile soon. Maybe I’m the last one to discover the causticTech blog, but it is great stuff. I can’t wait for the Slashdot that starts to speculate that Phil, the creator of causticTech blog is really Steve Ballmer.

My friend Chris posted a blog entry talking about his experience in working with SSH libraries for Java. After Googling, he’s settled on JSCH and J2SSH and needs some help on figuring out if there are any issues with those libraries or if he should consider something completely different. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated and will lead to lots of good blog karma.

Bill Zeller has come up with a pretty neat idea. He is trying to get enough donations to buy a new digital camera. The camera he is looking to buy is a Nikon D70 along with a telephoto lens and an adequate memory card. To that end, he is looking for donations from people and the one who gives the most will get his old camera. Pretty neat idea.

I liked Bill’s idea enough to donate $35.00. If I’m the highest donor, I’ll take the camera but I am sure someone will outbid me at the last minute. I just donated the money as I like Bill’s idea. Nice job Bill and I hope you get enough to get your camera.