Even though I primarily use Firefox for web browsing, I also use Internet Explorer. I find that it’s nice to have two browsers running at once. For example, if you have a couple of Yahoo! accounts you can quickly access both of them by having a different set of Yahoo! cookies enabled in each browser.

Unfortunately, one of the bad things about using IE 6 is that… well, it’s IE 6. Since Microsoft acquired a monopoly in web browsing after it killed Netscape, Microsoft did what all good monopolies do — they didn’t innovate. Ironically, this left an opening for products like Firefox, so thanks to Microsoft’s laziness, we now live in a much better browsing universe. And today that universe just got even better.

Today Microsoft released the beta 2 preview of IE 7. I’ve been using it for just a bit, but I like the new, cleaner interface, tabbed browsing, RSS integration (which kicks Firefox’s default RSS-integration’s butt), much better printing ability, multiple homepages (which you can set to load all at once) and better standards compliance/rendering. Try it out if you’re not afraid of beta 2 preview software (the new, new term for beta??).

Zoinger says, it’s about time.

P.S. Ok, I guess I’m a day behind, since the preview for IE 7 was actually released yesterday.

As I wrote about earlier, I finally managed to get Firefox 1.5 running on my computer. In fact, I’ve got it pretty much up-to-date including installing and customizing five or six extensions; extensions like Tabbrowser Extensions (the best Firefox extension btw) that require a lot of customization. I’ve also done a lot of munging to the user interface.

High-Speed Firefox User Interface

…and I’ve tweaked my userchrome.css file, blah, blah, blah. So the thought of painfully updating my old computer to this new Firefox 1.5 build didn’t sound all that appealing.

Fortunately, I remember hearing about Foldershare from a post on Scoble’s blog… that Foldershare was some sort of personal P2P networking utility or some such thing. Well, as it turns out one of the primary uses of Foldershare is to synchronize folders on two different computers — perfect for Firefox cloning.

After booting up both computers, downloading and installing Foldershare, I stumbled through the interface a bit — and after I almost did something really bad — I got an exact copy of my “master” Firefox build running on my old computer.

Zoinger says, Foldershare is right on.

P.S. I found the Foldershare instructions to be a bit lacking, so I somehow managed to copy my Firefox profile folder to the old computer, but I also deleted the “master” profile folder (the files weren’t really deleted, just moved to a Foldershare/Trash directory). Make sure you back up your folders before playing around with Foldershare if you are an idiot like me.

As part of upgrading to Firefox 1.5, I ended up downloading and reinstalling all of my Firefox extensions. I’m glad that I did, because the new version of Tabbrowser Extension (the best tab option extension… something that should be built into Firefox) has been substantially upgraded.

One of the biggest improvements to Tabbrowser is the addition of a “Tree Mode” for displaying tabs. Here’s a view of what it looks like:

View of tabs in tree mode
(Note tabs are displayed vertically, not the default Firefox horizontal)

Notice how some of the tabs are indented? An indent signifies that the tab is a daughter tab — that is, it is a page that was opened in a new tab from a link on the parent page. If you open a link in a new tab from a daughter page, the new page is indented twice and so on (the default maximum number of indents is three, but you can change this if you like).

This visual display really helps you keep track of your tabs and their origins. Great when you’ve got dozens of tabs open at once. Note that I’ve modified my userchrome.css file to change the background color of the active tab to yellow. I discuss this further in this post.

To setup your tabs to display in tree mode, select “Tree Mode” from Tabbrowser’s options category. This will display this option set:

Options page for tab modes

Tabbrowser Extension is one of the most powerful (and complicated) extensions for Firefox. To get a feel for all of its options, I recommend playing around with it for a half hour or so. You’ll really be surprised at the things that you can do with it.

I finally got Firefox 1.5 installed and working. How I actually fixed things, I’m not really sure. As with a lot of debugging with Windows, things just kind of randomly started working.

Earlier after giving up on getting 1.5 to work, I switched back to my previous install of Firefox. This worked great for a while until I started getting the error The program must close to allow a previous installation attempt to complete. Please restart every time I tried to start Firefox. I searched on the text of the error message, and found this page on MozillaZine discussing issues with Firefox not starting up.

The MozillaZine page suggested deleting xpicleanup.dat which I did. This worked and allowed me to get my old version of Firefox working again. On a lark, I decided to try and reinstall 1.5 again just for kicks. Whatthefuckever, it worked!

Classic. You’d think that it’d be “easy” to upgrade to Firefox 1.5 from 1.04 (ok, I had a somewhat older build). No way.

Yesterday I figured it’d take me about a hour or so to get 1.5 up and running with all my extensions and themes installed. I started out by backing up my old version (thank goodness), then uninstalled it, download 1.5, install it, double clicked on the Firefox icon and… nothing. Won’t start. So after three or four attempts at uninstalling 1.5, reinstalling it, rebooting, etc., it still won’t run. It shows up for few seconds in the Task Manager as a process (firefox.exe), but then just disappears from the list. Great.

I figure it’s got to be something with the my registry. Hold crap Batman. Turns out that my registry is full of references to Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird (which I also uninstalled just in case) and friggin’ even Netscape (I have never installed Netscape’s browser on my machine). No way I can clean up all of the registry crap. Somewhere along the line, Firefox/Phoenix(the old name/builds) has polluted the registry to the point where 1.5 now won’t work.

A quick web/blog search for a similar problem yielded notta.

Well, it was getting to be time to reinstall Windows, since my current build is over a year old. Yes sports fans, Windows gets progressively slower and less reliable the more you run it — and Microsoft better fix this in Vista, but probably won’t.

1.04 doesn’t look that bad to me now.