An Update

It’s been brought to my attention — repeatedly — that I neglected to post anything for the last month and a half. Oops.

I upgraded my macbook to 10.5.3 earlier tonight. Upon reboot, everything was shiny till I attempted to launch Firefox. It did one little bounce in the dock and gave up. Attempting to run it from the terminal in safe mode was no better.

Of course, OS X does its best to insulate the user from the system, so finding useful logs was out of the question. All /var/log/system.log told me was that Firefox exited with error code 1.

In a fit of desperation, I deleted my version of Firefox and downloaded Firefox 3 RC1. After the install, it launched. So now I’m running that less-than-polished software.

I’ve been running the Firefox 3 betas on my Ubuntu machine at work since February or so. Each release seems to get progressively worse: they’re all of them unstable, slow, and have an annoying new address bar. Now that I made the mistake of updating the work machine to Ubuntu 8.04, I’m stuck with using Beta 5 everyday. (Dear Canonical: Please don’t ship stable releases with beta software. Thanks.) I’ve enjoyed coming home to the stable, usable, and speedy Firefox 2.

To be fair, my Firefox 3 experience up to now was limited only to the Linux versions, and I’d not used the release candidate on any platform. So far, RC1 on OS X doesn’t seem too bad.