C#, VB.Net, XML and mass consumption of coffee.

FireFox has been my browser of choice for quite some time. I am the kind of guy who likes customization. There is a certain ways my computer has to be set up, its just the kind of person I am. Perhaps for me the most important feature of FireFox would be plug-ins. This is the best tool for customization of your browser. Now, I have been impressed with newest Internet Explorer, add-ons are step in the right direction, but at this point there are no add-ons to help with coding, but when it comes to FireFox, well, let me just list some:

Most obvious - Web Developer – lets just say that this is a must have if you are coding for web. List of features is just too long and I am just to lazy to list everything, lets just say without it any kind of coding for web would just take too long.

Firebug - simply put one of the best tools for debugging your web site. Add YSlow and get in depth analysis of what is going on with your project.

Pencil – free and quite powerful tool for UI prototyping and diagrams, try it out. It won’t replace industry standard software, I for one prefer Visio or coffee shop napkins and black pen, depends on where the idea strikes me, but if you need to do something quick, Pencil would do just fine.

FireFTP I can’t really count number of times I needed to ftp something quickly. FireFTP serves just that purpose. I can’t really recommend it for transferring bunch of files, keeps on timing out, but then again, I have not really played with all settings to affect that.

Codetch - an IDE like plugin which lets you work with your files in a manner similar to Dreamweaver. Once again, for a full blown project I would use a stand alone IDE, most likely Visual Studio or Komodo Edit, but for a quick change Codetch does the job.

There are more, much more. These are the things that I use quite often. Now, with all that great functionality, would I consider FireFox as a development platform? The answer is no. There are tools that are designed specifically for development purposes, while FireFox is a browser. It might be handy to keep a jump drive with overloaded FireFox installed handy for some quick coding while your machine is unavailable, but for full blow development project, there are tools that can do the job much better.

This has been a quick and strange announcement.  I had read about it in the morning – actually watched that whole set of comics as I found the whole concept of explaining a new product through use of popuralized medium such as comics highly interesting.  First thing I thought of – what about FireFox – after all Google and Mozilla have been working together for quite some time.  I do understand the intention of Google to actually go and do their own thing – sometimes you have to do this to satisfy the need.  

As I was about to go home, I got a link to download the Chrome in it’s beta form.  Well, I have to admit – thins thing is great.  At least so far I am very happy with what they have done.  UI is simple and to the point – at first I thought having your tabs above the address bar is bizarre, but after couple of minutes I realized that this is where they are supposed to be – after all that’s a tab, and it has it’s own address bar and the rest.  By placing it above the rest of the window, that whole point is just emphasized.  According to the comics, the main thing was having multi threaded browser, where javascript would not lock up your browser, and I guess they’ve got that figured out.  There are couple of sites out there where I had to switch to IE just to view the content, as FireFox would take forever to load it – with Chrome this is not an issue.  Chrome is supposed to be a great platform for use with web apps as static HTML is a thing of the past, and that is a great point.  Web is not going anywhere, complexity of web apps are growing exponentially and will continue to do so in the future, we need to have a new browser to accommodate these trends.

There are couple of things that I think could have been done better, but after all this is beta, and I am sure the product will be improved.  For instance – after install I had to go through the dialog on importing settings from FireFox.  Passwords and usernames are fine, but my bookmarks from FireFox are nowhere to be found, although to be fair I have not really conducted extensive search.

Overall Chrome is great and it will become even better as it will mature