I remember the first browser I ever used. It was AOL. Does that really qualify as a browser? Man, those were the days. I soon switched over to Netscape Navigator, and I say now that it because it was more lightweight, but honestly, as a child, I didn't need a good reason to like it better. It probably had something to do with the Parental Controls.

Those things aside, my browser changes were pretty consistent for a number of years. From Navigator to IE, IE to Opera, Opera to Firefox, and then an amazing thing happened that completely changed my world. I got a Mac. When I first started using the Mac, I wasn't too happy with Safari, but a friend talked me into giving it a shot, and I fell in love. It was lightweight, fast, and easy to use. Safari quickly replaced Firefox as my default browser. It has been a nice 4 years with Safari, but today, I declare Firefox will reclaim its place at the top of my Browser list.

There are a number of reason that Safari was overthrown from its thrown, but the number one reason was, I got tired to having to switch to Firefox for flash or when Safari just refused to load a page. The straw that broke the back of the proverbial camel, was when yesterday, I was watching Hulu, and every few commercials, would completely freeze the player. Eventually I switched to Firefox and had no problems. I decided... why should I only use Firefox to bat cleanup, when I can use it every pitch.

Sayonara Safari.
Konnichi wa Firefox.

It's been too busy around these parts for me to put together a post about the exciting things happening in the DC tech community, particularly in the hobbyist electronics space (short version: they're exciting!). But I can at least share this tip.

Many of you are probably using the newly-released Firefox 3 release candidate, and it seems likely that some of you are running into the same problems with Firebug that I was, particularly when using its Javascript console. Big, angry errors with "NS" and "SECURITY" in them? Yup, that's the one.

Well, get thee over to the firebug downloads page and grab the latest alpha. It solves this problem, but introduces a new one for those debugging a jQuery-enabled page: the jQuery object is nowhere to be found.

Actually, it's not that bad: you just need to do something like this

$ = window.$;

Before you start mucking around with scripting from the console. It's irritating, but I'm sure it'll be fixed soon. And in the meantime, you could always whip up a Greasemonkey script to do this job automatically.