A billion Firefox downloads, still waiting for Chrome
The Mozilla project says that as of today, Firefox — in all its versions and platforms — has been downloaded a billion times. That’s pretty impressive.
I use Firefox for the Mac (current version 3.5.1) almost exclusively, though Apple’s Safari serves when I want to have a second, independent, browser running.
Every so often (generally after a major update) I try to switch to Safari as my default browser, but then always switch back to Firefox after a couple of days. I know that Apple claims that Safari is faster, but Firefox is better.
What about Google’s Chrome? I’d love to try it, but Google still hasn’t released a version for Mac OS X. In June, Google offered a Mac alpha of the open-source version, called Chromium. You can download the Chromium alphas for Mac and Linux, but Google recommends:
DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.
Even though I’m a developer, I’ll wait, thanks.
Nah, go ahead, try the dev channel
(we don’t call it alpha).
That warning was just about
managing expectations.
It’s really coming along nicely,
and it’s updated roughly weekly.
The place to go is
http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel
Try it for a day or two. It’s not
quite beta quality today, but it’s getting close.
Disclaimer: I’m a Chrome developer,
so I might be biased 🙂
Random software development plug: having valgrind on your continuous build and test is the bee’s knees. It caught a double free today, and beat us over the head until we fixed it.