Firefox 1.5 RC3 Real Soon Now

The countdown to Firefox 1.5 continues. According to the
latest in the support forums, there will be an RC3 Real Soon Now.
In my limited experience, an RC3 is rather unusual. My reading of
the tea leaves is there are a bunch of problems yet to be ironed
out. I could be wrong, though. YMMV. Insert disclaimer here.

In any case, one of those problems appears to be with the very
popular
AdBlock plug-in (link goes to their support forum). The
advice from the Firefox forum is to switch to AdBlock Plus.
However, when I did that, AdBlock Plus exhibited a menu display
error. I won’t go into detail but this is a bug that the current
version of Adblock had fixed earlier but is now reappearing in
Adblock Plus. Sigh. No one said OpenSource software is
perfect.

I’m also becoming discouraged by some of the forum chatter
which seems to indicate what I would consider to be major
problems (especially with print preview) within Firefox 1.5, will
not be fixed any time soon.

So, even after 1.5 goes gold, there may be major problems to
deal with. Although I still think Firefox is
better/safer/standards compliant than IE, the folks over at
Mozilla need to know that I won’t continue to use software that
is unreliable.

Will My Next PC Be a Mac?

Well, maybe. I have my eye on a Mac Mini but I won’t
even think of buying until the Intel processors are folded in
sometime next year. I mean, why buy now, before the Intel CPUs
are out, if you know your Mac will become defunct in less than a
year? But if/when I do eventually buy, I might want to check out
this site that lists OpenSource software for
Macs. OpenSource software wouldn’t be the only reason to go
the Macs, nor maybe even the main reason. But knowing that such
software is available is a consideration.

By the way, I know there are rumors that some Intel CPU
powered Macs will be coming out early next year, rather than the
announced Q3/Q4 of 2006 timeframe. Perhaps. But I don’t think MS has
cornered the market on rumors designed to create fear, uncertainty,
and doubt. Why would Apple spread similar, although slightly
different rumors? Perhaps because if a customer were thinking
about buying a computer within the next six to nine months and
knew that Apple would not have anything available, he or she
would probably buy somewhere else. But if rumors started going
around that Apple would have such Intel PCs available within that
timeframe, you might decide to wait. Now, be clear, I don’t have
any insider information and for all I know, come January 1st,
Apple will debut a bunch of Intel powered Macs. Or not. Well,
this is just idle speculation. YMMV. Insert disclaimer here.

Aloha!