TenFourFox 6 Beta

TenFourFox 6 Beta is here. It's based on Firefox 6. Are we already at Firefox 6? Soon it'll be 7, 8, and I'll feel like Keir Dullea in the last part of 2001 where he's the old man in the pristine white room whose world has passed him by. It seems like just yesterday I was oooing and awwing at version 3.

Anyway, the results so far are all good with one exception. The non domain name part of the url is grayed out in the address bar. It's kind of annoying at first, but it's easy to get over. Memory usage seems to a tad less than version 5 but not a huge difference. Speed? I never know if it's actually faster or if it's just the placebo effect of taking a nice new spiffy browser out of the box. But it feels zippy. Oh, and plugins are disabled by default, so if you want them you have to manually enable them as described here.

The best part, though, is now Twitter works again. They rewrote their website and it suddenly stopped working in 5. It was a javascript problem, and now it's fixed in 6. The whole debacle actually pointed me to a useful extension called YesScript. It's kind of like NoScript, only the complete opposite. It's not mind-numbingly complicated, and it enables you to blacklist individual sites instead of the entire internet. I used it to blacklist Twitter temporarily so I could at least read individual's pages with javascript turned off, but now all that's a moot point. Still, YesScript is a nice find and I recommend you try it out.

Oh, and I've been pointed to a highly experimental add-on that lets you play h.264 video in a Quicktime window. So if you want to turn your beta into an alpha, download it and install it per the instructions here.