Saying goodbye to Firefox

Up until now I’ve been impressed by Firefox for several reasons; what with it’s once pioneering level of standards compliancy I’ve found it a great platform to preview my sites on, going with the principle ‘code for FF, hack (workaround) for IE’. A biproduct of FF’s success has resulted with the guys at IE pulling their finger out and delivering a half-decent ’standards-compliant’ browser.

But recently however, I’ve become a bit discontent with it; as far as I’m concerned it’s lagging behind the competition somewhat.

In a recent article, I investigated its latest nightly build and compared it to the competition- I found the results to be surprising. Using CSS.Info’s Selector Test, the latest nightly at that time only passed 36 out of the 43 tests, compared to Opera 9.5 Beta and the latest Webkit nightly with both of them passing all 43 tests. Being an advocate of progressive enhancement, I try and use these cutting-edge selectors wherever possible in my projects (nth-child rocks!). But with FF now having inferior CSS support, I need to move on to using another browser.

Really the only thing that was stopping me using another browser was FF’s superb Firebug. Opera’s David Storey has been recently mentioning on his blog about a current Opera project codenamed Dragonfly. Both Opera and David are being very secretive about what it actually is and the secrecy surrounding it has sparked much discussion in the web community as to what it could be- kudos to David and the Opera guys for building this hype; as far as I’m concerned it’s a breath of fresh air for vendors to be generating this kind of hype surrounding a product release.

I’m with the majority here, by thinking it’s probably some neat web developer tool – if this is the case, I’d switch to using Opera as my main browser immediately, saying goodbye to Firefox for good.