The Firefox extensions are one of the best parts of Firefox. There are a bunch of different things that I like in a browser that I don't really think belong in the overall browser bundle. However, reading through the build forums one of the things that they say is if you are having a bug, see if it works on a default Firefox install without any extensions. So they can be a big contributing factor to instability.

In terms of Firefox extensions for helping out web-development, a lot of the goodness is in the bookmarklets, some of which work in opera. However, one the most important ones for me is the JavaScript shell, which allows you to open up a shell to JavaScript scoped to the page you are looking at, and mess with the DOM interactively, it’s great. http://www.squarefree.com/ is a great resource for Firefox, he’s written a number of bookmarklets, as well as some other stuff that’s just funny.

I generally have Firefox fuck up for me once or twice a day... but to be fair to the Mozilla team, one of the extensions I'm using is Tabbedbrowser Extensions which adds a LOT of functionality to tabs, and is widely regarded as one of the less stable extensions. I also have about a dozen other extensions installed (that list is no longer complete, but gives an idea). From having talked to them, I seem to use the browser a lot more intensively than Ryan and Russ; it is not uncommon for me to have 3 or 4 browser windows each ~10 tabs open. When I hit a hard problem I tend to do a lot of searching and end up with a lot of tabs open. I categorize results by window, the ability to drag tabs between windows is one of the things Tabbedbrowser Extensions provides that I have found rather useful for this categorization.

That reminds me of something else. In an effort to make Firefox fast, the developers have chosen to make it somewhat of a memory hog. Standard memory usage for me is about 75MB with peak going up over 150MB. At least in windows they have done some tricks to try to keep the browser in memory and not paged to disk. This makes it go nice and speedy if you have a bunch of RAM (1GB at work and home now J, but if you minimize the window and do something else for a while, Firefox can take 5-10s to page everything back in and become usable.

Firefox now has a good system for updating extensions; it can check a remote server, download and install the new extension for you. This is supposed to be working for Firefox itself but I haven't tried it out yet.

There was a point right before I started using Phoenix 0.4 that I tried out opera, and it had one thing that was a deal-breaker for me. When you click on a dropdown list, then typed something into the keyboard to jump to that selection, it is my habit to then click on the select box proper to lock in the selection, not the item in the list that I want to select. In IE and Firefox this works beautifully, but at least at the time in opera that would restore it to its original value instead of selecting the new value. This annoyed me enough that I scratched opera off the list :-)

I still feel that Firefox has some pretty annoying bugs in it, I've been following one about it not picking up the scroll wheel or keyboard scrolling when you are inside of a div block with overflow: auto, but there is a patch currently in review for that one.

Firefox 0.9 is theoretically feature frozen, although a couple new items are creeping in. They are gunning for 1.0 about mid-September, given that 0.9 is already a very good release I’m really looking forward to 1.0.

I’d recommend installing Firefox and playing around with it a bit, if not now, then when 1.0 hits. If you do, please let me know what you’re impressions are.

Hope this adds some good solid (completely subjective) information to the debate, something that has probably been missing ;-)

 

UPDATE: Since I uninstalled one of my extensions Firefox has been very stable. The extension that was causing it was JS Console status, which runs fine on one of my friends installations of Firefox... weird. The only reason I have had to close firefox recently is to update to the latest nightly build.