Technocrank

Yet another incarnation of the impending Firefox 3.5 release, although it doesn’t seem to be up at the normal beta version download site which still has 3.5b4.  Apparently, if you download 3.5b4 and then do an in-browser Check For Updates you’ll be fixed up proper.

Firefox 3.1b3, released today is downloadable here.  If they’d waited another day, they could have numbered it 3.141592, Beta 4, and put it up at 4:32pm (since they’re now considering continuing the arbitrary version numbering scheme).  Oh well.  Life is full of missed chances for nerds.  What is that, anyway?  A number pun?

I’ll be waiting for the OSX Intel optimized version at latko.org who says it should probably be up today sometime.

Update: here it is.

Firefox 3.1b2
Google Gears 0.5.4.2

You know what would be really faboo? If the devs for Google Gears figured out it was worthwhile looking at the non-compatibility issue with Firefox 3.1 and Google Gears. I know, I know, it’s free software and there are a million other things to get to. And they’ve said (unofficially) that by the time Firefox 3.1 gets out of beta they’ll be ready. The only reason I’m asking is this:

There are now a preponderance of sites out there now that are JavaScript heavy. All Google products, Facebook, MySpace, and yeah, WordPress – especially the admin backend which is now AJAX supercharged. So when you’re dealing with these sites a lot it really makes a big difference having a browser that can crank through the JS routines and render the damn page already. This is why I’m working with the beta version of Firefox 3.1 (actually, now the OSX optimized version, Shiretoko – there are Windows versions out there too) which has the Tracemonkey JavaScript engine enabled. It’s quite fast; incidentally I’m also testing WebKit, the Safari engine development version which is right up there too.

Anyway, FF 3.1 makes a big difference in shaving off my waiting time, especially here in WordPress-land. And incidentally, the kind folks at WordPress have incorporated Google Gears functionality to offload the download…load. Works great on WebKit/Safari, but since the Gears guys haven’t worked out the FF 3.1 compatibility yet, we’re still waiting.

Not a big rush, really…but it’s Valentine’s Day. Blow me a kiss, boys.