Last summer, tired of Firefox 2’s slow and crashy performance on OSX, I switched to using Safari as my primary browser. Though I still opened up Firefox to manage research sources with Zotero and to debug web apps with Firebug, Safari plus Inquisitor was fantastic for everyday browsing–until the recent update to Safari 3.1. Suddenly my fast and sleek browsing experience became a nightmare of crashes. Uninstalling Inquisitor didn’t help, and neither did uninstalling Flash. So farewell Safari, and on to Firefox 3. Firefox 3 turns out to be really nice, and all the key add-ons I need seem to be working for it. I installed Firebug 1.1 and the current development version of Zotero. YSlow works too, although you need to edit its install.rdf and change the maxVersion from 3.0b4pre to 3.0b4. Now I’ve got a browser almost as fast and good-looking as Safari, with far less crashes, and no need to switch applications when I want to save citations or do some debugging. Thanks, Firefox coders!