The latest Firefox 3 betas are really good, and a big improvement over Firefox 2. The improvement in performance on my Eee PC is enormous, but even on the quad-core Xeon I’ve got at work, the increased snappiness is welcome. There are some good interface tweaks as well; after learning to work with the ‘Awesome Bar’ rather than against it, I’ve come to like it. Unfortunately, there’s a downside: Selenium, which we use for acceptance testing at Reevoo, doesn’t work with Firefox 3.

I’m sure that this state of affairs will be addressed in the near future as Firefox 3 gets closer to release, but, in the meantime, it’s easy enough to get Selenium working without having to go back to the Dark Ages of Firefox 2 browsing:

  • Install Firefox 3 in ~/Applications
  • Install Firefox 2 in /Applications

Stick the newer application from your home directory in the Dock and use it for browsing; Selenium will find the older application in the system Applications directory and use that for its purposes. Everyone’s happy!