Firefox is a pig.  Well, it was a pig, and now, as of Firefox 3.0b4, it's a piglet.

Since November, I've been using Safari as my main browser, and hauling out Firefox for particular sites that don't work in Safari or for when I needed Firebug.  As of last week, I've changed back to Firefox.

I wouldn't say Firefox necessarily uses less memory than Safari now, but it stopped being worth having both of them open.  Firefox 3.0b4 not only uses much less memory than before, but it reclaims memory better.  I've had about three crashes, but none in the past few days.

Before I realised that you could just use the Firebug 1.1 beta, I thought I wanted to run both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0b4.  It turns out to be fairly easy.  Rename the Firefox 2 application to something imaginative like Firefox2.  Create a simple shell script named firefox.sh (or whatever you want):

#!/bin/sh

MYDIR=`dirname "$0"`
cd "${MYDIR}"
./firefox-bin -P firefox2 "$@"

Copy that shell script into Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS on the command line, or right-click on Firefox2 in Finder, select "Show Package Contents", and paste it into the Contents/MacOS directory.

From the command line, run "open Info.plist" in the Contents directory, or simply double-click it in Finder.  Change the Root/CFBundleExecutable to firefox.sh (or whatever you called it).

You can now run the Firefox2.app application and use "Keep in Dock" on it.  The first time you run it, it will show the profile manager.  Create a profile named "firefox2".  You can install Firefox 2 add-ons and so forth without interfering with your Firefox 3.0b4 install.  Or so it seems so far, at least.

For the past two days, I've been trying the Better Gmail extension for Firefox, which packages together a number of Greasemonkey scripts so that you don't have to worry about manually installing all sorts of extensions and scripts.

The only useful part for me (at least so far) is the keyboard macros - which aren't even enabled by default in the extension.  Gmail's keyboard shortcuts were somewhat useful, but having to change over to the mouse limited the potential.  Now, I can do pretty much everything without a mouse.  "gin" to go to the inbox.  "gsp" to go to the spam folder.  "lpy" to label a message as related to Pylons.  "XurXn" to select all unread messages and mark them as read and then to unselect all.  And there seems to be some sort of queueing, since I can get quite a bit ahead of what the Gmail interface is showing me sometimes.

Oh, okay, it's not that bad.  So long as you don't have too many add-ons installed.  But, you know, as a "developer" that has to debug other people's broken web stuff, you need those add-ons.  And, you know, they're actually quite nice.

Anyway, running the same set of add-ons on Firefox for development and plain browsing is not working out.

Of course, none of this is rocket science, or even new, so everybody else probably knows anyway.

I now have one "firefox -P default" icon and one "firefox -P development" icon on my panel, and browsing is fast again (I'd totally forgotten quite how fast) and development is still featureful.

(And, I guess, if you're into that sort of stuff, you can use a totally different profile for your House erotica fanfic writing persona and another for your respectable normal persona.)