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Every once in a while I do a couple hours of my Web-intensive work in Internet Explorer on the aging Windows box the company provides for me.

It's running IE 8 with XP, and let me tell you, IE 8 is a slow, surly dog. I remember IE 6 being much quicker, but you could shove an icepick into your own eye waiting for a new tab to open in IE 8.

Since I code for the Web and we have a huge IE user base, I do need to use IE more than you'd think. One thing MS did do was add some developer tools to the browser in version 8. While it's a bit clunky and more than a bit slow on my 3 GHz Celeron/512 MB RAM Dell box, you can actually make changes to the HTML and CSS on pages with the development tool a la Firebug and Web Developer in Firefox.

For raw speed, Firefox and Opera have IE on the ropes. What about Google Chrome? It doesn't take long on this box before I can barely get a screen to refresh between tabs without wondering if the ghost of IEs present has taken it over.

Without FF, the world would be a much more annoying place.

When I set up this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with OpenBSD 4.4 late last year, I decided to go with Firefox 2.0.0.16 instead of the newer Firefox 3.0.1.

I had used FF3 in Ubuntu and on Windows quite a bit, and I finally began running it in Mac OS now that I finally upgraded the iBook to OS X 10.4.

But until now I stuck with FF2 on this OpenBSD laptop.

By the time OpenBSD 4.5 is released in May, FF2 will be no more. That was another factor governing my decision to finally upgrade to FF3.

I finally decided to make the leap from FF2 to FF3. (Remember that OpenBSD doesn't generally update binary packages after each release. Unless you run -current and compile everything, it's six months between upgrades for the OS and the applications.)

I was prepared for trouble, but everything went well. It didn't hurt a bit. All of my FF2 settings and bookmarks are intact, as are my add-ons (including Web Developer). Java still works, too. And performance of FF3 seems more than a little bit snappier than FF2. I can really feel the difference with Web-based apps that use a lot of Javascript.

Yeah, I'm months late to the FF3 party (at least on this platform), but I can more than safely say that I'm damn glad I finally and painlessly made the switch.

To replace FF2 with FF3, here's what I did in an xterm window:

$ sudo pkg_delete mozilla-firefox
Password:
mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.16p3: complete
Clean shared items: complete
$ sudo pkg_add -i firefox3
firefox3-3.0.1p3: complete
--- firefox3-3.0.1p3 -------------------
Please see /usr/local/mozilla-firefox/README.OpenBSD
for information about running Firefox on OpenBSD.

OpenBSD users face a similar dilemma in version 4.5, in which OpenOffice 2.4 will co-exist along with OO3. For the release after that, just like with FF, OO2.4 will be gone, and only OO3.x will remain. I'm OK with that, too. I just started using OO3 in Windows, and I think it's a pretty good release thus far.

I love it when things work. It happens more often than not in OpenBSD, and that's why I've stuck with it. If things were breaking down software-wise, I'd be sprinting back to Linux. But as long as not having Flash 9 or 10 doesn't totally harsh my proverbial mellow (OpenBSD is mired in Flash 7 due to subsequent Linux Flash Players insisting on ALSA sound, which the BSDs don't have), I'm comfortable.

And if I could manage to edit video in Blender, I would work around the lack of up-to-date Flash.

Now ... back to the OpenBSD way of keeping things up to date (or not ...).

I can't decide whether, and if so how much, I'm troubled by keeping the same version of various apps on my machine for six months at at time. At one level, I'm happy not to be constantly doing apt-get update apt-get upgrade or having the Update Manager pop up every day.

But if you want to keep current in OpenBSD, you need to either patch your box to -stable, or just run -current which is what developers and other edgy types install on their own equipment. I'll confess that if I understood a little better how to make a -release box -stable, or keep a -current box current, I'd be more game for doing it (and I might get there at some point). I do know that a lot of compiling is involved, and I'm no fan of sitting and waiting for ports to build. But if Firefox 3.0.8 is what I craved, I could get it now either in by running -current or by and building the port. Even in Ports, Firefox is stuck at 3.0.1 in my 4.4 environment.

I've seen a few users claim that keeping an OpenBSD box at -stable or running -current and updating it is no big deal. I'd love for that to be the case.

Right now, on this install, I have maybe 2.5 GB in /usr, and after my experience running out of space to build Java, I'm reluctant when it comes to bringing down the source of OpenBSD and compiling it. This is just about as close to a "production" machine as I have, and I can't risk bricking the install, so I'll be ordering my OpenBSD 4.5 CDs very soon (make that very, very soon) and upgrading that way. I've done it once, and hopefully I can do it again.

Even though I do a lot of work in Firefox, where Chris Pedrick's excellent Web Developer add-on helps me code, whenever I'm doing "casual browsing," working in Movable Type, Google Docs, Gmail or any of the various Web-based programs I rely on that allow it, I use the Google Chrome browser.

Why? Speed.

Even though I think a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM is adequate for Windows XP, there's no denying that Chrome is faster to load and run than Firefox (and Firefox leaves Internet Explorer 7 way back in the dust). Chrome is right up there with the Opera browser when it comes to speed, but already Chrome does better in terms of rendering pages.

And basically Google Chrome is a nice, lean, uncomplicated browser.

I made it my default browser because every time I click on a link in an e-mail (usually in Thunderbird, by the way), the machine would open that link in Firefox. And on this box, while I am using Firefox for development, I'm happier doing the rest of my browsing in Chrome.

I haven't yet had the opportunity to run Firefox 3.1, which is supposed to be much faster than 3.0.x.

So what if Chrome had a tool like Web Developer? And what if Chrome ran (and ran well) in non-Windows environments (Linux, BSDs, Mac OS)? Just more world domination for Google (and a faster box for me).

Web Developer or Firebug?: I should probably try to familiarize myself with the Firebug extension for Firefox. Having more than one tool to help with Web development (and I need all the help I can get), isn't a bad thing. I guess I use Web Developer because it was the first of the two that I was able to get working the way I needed it.

Related:

Google Chrome: What does it offer developers?
Chromium Developer Documentation