Ubiquity 0.1.1 released!

release notes

Firefox 3 beta is stable

I had been holding out on installing Firefox 3 beta on any thing but a virtual machine for testing. In the past, with version 2, I had run beta's and it had been my experience that upgrading from beta to the actual releases left things a bit unstable. Perhaps the profile had changes that caused random crashes, but it was irritating enough that I stayed away. Reading crunchgear's article might just change my mind though:

Firefox 3 won’t be out of beta until the end of June but Mozilla told Reuters yesterday that anyone can go ahead and download the most recent version and run it without worrying too much. It’s now stable enough for everyone, not just developers.

And I really want to try out the new mac theme (windows/linux themes seem boring comparatively). And I don't think I can wait till the end of June!

new browsers

Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again

...next version of Firefox, codenamed "Gran Paradiso". The target release date is sometime in the third quarter this year and it hopes to release a major version of Firefox every year.

...

Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product "within 18-24 months".

Umm ... wow. 18-24 months?!? From what I had been reading I thought Microsoft had learnt its lesson, that is to release fast and often. But just look at the firefox dates and Microsoft dates.

Its becoming more and more apparent that for large projects open source development model is far faster and achieves better results. Just look at Firefox vs IE, or Ubuntu vs Vista. Heck even Python/Ruby vs. C#/Java (thought I'm not really too sure about this last one yet).

Firefox 2.0 and backspace

Now here is an example of interesting search you can come across thanks to blogsearch. On my kubuntu install firefox 2.0 does not go back in history when you hit the backspace key. On my OS X box it does. I'm not sure how true the above article is, but it gives one explanation of why the backspace key doesn't work the same on Linux, and the politics behind it.