zahnster

Most people who would be reading this blog know that today Firefox 3 is released to the public. I’ve been itching to get this release for a while – FF3 uses a totally different graphics engine and already I can tell that it’s a lot slicker, smoother, and overall just kicks some ass.

The FF3 update is pretty massive, and there’s a lot of reasons we all will want to switch over to it as soon as we can (not just the graphics thing). However, within 30 seconds of running the app – I noticed that it has new rendering differences (improvements) from the FF2 version. Quickly this turned into a sticky situation, as I was in the middle of debugging some CSS in FF2 that, well… worked perfectly in FF3. It brought home the sad fact that as web developers, we’re still totally owned by browser compatibility issues* and need to support FF2 for a while – until the 3.0 transition is long a thing of the past.

So what’s a girl to do? I really like FF3 and would like to run it as my main browser. Quickly, I reinstalled FF2 as a secondary browser, but alas, FF3 and FF2 cannot be run at the same time, and there’s some weirdness with the Firebug plugin (which is an essential for web developers). I was about to raise my arms in frustration and head back to FF2, when I decided to check Google for some answers.

Quickly I found an excellent resource on how to run multiple Firefoxes at the same time by using a little-known Firefox feature known as a ‘Profile’. The solution posted on the blog is limited to Mac people (Windows peeps, have fun with your own google search), and is targeted for running FF1.0 and 1.5, however it worked exactly the same for 2/3.

Good luck, and happy Firefoxing!

*I didn’t mean to sound so dire, the rendering differences in ff3 actually bring it more on-par with web standards. The future is promising, but we’re only on day 1 and still plagued by the browsers of the past.