Download Day: Unexpected Consequences

As everyone who reads this is probably aware, the long-awaited release of Firefox 3 was celebrated with "Download Day" on June 17th (or June 18th, for those of us who reside in the future). Download Day was all about setting a world record for software downloads in a single day, or something. Given that there was no existing world record to beat, this seemed somewhat pointless to me, but having refrained from using any alpha, beta or RC versions of the new Firefox I was quite excited about Download Day.

Of course, the whingers of the world got what they wanted when Mozilla's servers fell over just before Download Day was officially set to begin. Nerds everywhere grabbed at the chance to sit at their computers, frantically hitting Refresh and/or complaining on Twitter about how stupid Mozilla were for not anticipating and preventing the problem.

All of this took place at 3 a.m. here in the future, so by the time I woke up everything was better¹ and I downloaded the precious .dmg file. However! Ungrateful sod that I am, I didn't install it right away. My pathetic dependency on some of my possibly-incompatible Firefox extensions made me fear the upgrade; what if I suddenly became unable to use the internet in the manner to which I had become accustomed? Life as I know it would grind to a halt.

Fortunately, days before Download Day I had been reminded about Flock, the "social browser" built on Firefox. I had tried an infant version of Flock a couple of years ago, but I didn't need the extra features and there was too much blue and orange in the colour scheme and, besides, Firefox was just better. Fast forward two years, and a new Flock beta built on Firefox 3 code has just been released. Perfect! I installed the Flock beta and imported all my Firefox settings, then proceeded to try to make everything work the way I wanted it to. If things went wrong, at least I wouldn't have futzed around with my precious Firefox installation and I could return to its welcoming, familiar arms.

The extension that I was most worried about was Vertigo, just about the only "critical" extension that hadn't been updated for Firefox 3. After using Firefox with a vertical column of tabs for quite some time, I dreaded the thought of going back. Vertical tabs take up only space that I have in abundance (mmm, widescreen), and they make it possible to have twenty or more tabs open at once and still identify them at a glance. None of that multi-row or tab-scrolling nonsense, thank you.

Sadly, my hours of fiddling with compatibility checks and ridiculous kludges were fruitless. Every time I thought I had Vertigo working properly (or properlyish) I would restart my browser, only to see it break in yet another unexpected way. The few Firefox-3-compatible extensions that offered vertical tabs either included an indenting tree structure or were unavailable for Mac.² Rage! I even installed Firefox 3 itself in the faint hope that the problems I were having were specific to Flock. No such luck.

I should note that several extensions I had previously relied on to fix silly problems with Firefox (most notably Long Titles) have become unnecessary with the new release, because the silly problems have been fixed at last. This is a Good Thing, as are the many improvements to prettiness and performance. However, the lack of sensible vertical tabs made me decided to return, shamefaced, to Firefox 2.

But disaster awaited me! Either my fickle nature had offended Firefox 2, or I had released some new gremlins, because Vertigo now failed to work reliably in Firefox 2 as well. What's more, the whole browser crashed repeatedly and for no apparent reason.³ What to do, what to do. The thought of meekly upgrading to Firefox 3 again and re-learning how to live a horizontal-tabbed life made me sad.⁴

Then - inspiration! If I had to adjust to a new browsing experience, why not adjust to one with a whole lot of extra features that were actually tremendously useful to me? Flock integrates nicely with Gmail and almost all the silly "Web 2.0" websites that usually eat far too much of my time, taking all the pointless and time-consuming aspects of participation out of the equation. It also comes with all the performance improvements⁵ of Firefox 3.

I still want a few more things from Flock. Integration with Google Reader, Last.fm and Tumblr, and maybe Google Calendar; word wrap in the People sidebar; vertical tabs, although that's something that I expect will have to come from an extension developer. But the awesome thing is that they have sane, friendly, responsive employees who are interested in feedback from users, and requested changes actually get implemented, so I may actually get what I want and have nothing to complain about.⁶

So, Flock makes this whole internet browsing game more efficient and less frustrating, while also giving me the opportunity to thumb my nose at Mozilla for not doing everything exactly how I wanted them to. Brilliant.

Alternate reading: Firefox, like rickrolling and cat macros, is just too mainstream for me to like it anymore.

1. Except for all of the snarky comments and forum posts that still litter the internet, that is. [↩]
2. When did that start happening, anyway? Stupid extensions. [↩]
3. I realise that, for some people, this has always been standard procedure for Firefox. All I can say is that I never had any problems before, damn it. [↩]
4. Why, yes, I do spend too much time on the internet. Why do you ask? [↩]
5. Well, the jury is still out on this "AwesomeBar" nonsense, but it will probably worm its wormy way into my heart eventually. [↩]
6. Please don't ask what I'll do then. I just don't know. [↩]