A review of Office 2007, which I worked on along with several other authors, is up on TechWeb. (I wrote the Word, Outlook and Access portions of the review.)
See what you think!
Software: November 2006 Archives
Something I've always liked about Firefox is the community of developers who create custom builds of the program -- they take the source code and compile it with specific optimizations. Among the very best is the Stipespeed builds, created with optimizations for the most modern processors and markedly faster than the stock Firefox build right out of the box.
Stipe released his build of Firefox 2.0 back at the end of October. If you want to use it and you already have an existing Firefox install, all you need to do is unpack it into a directory by itself and run the firefox.exe executable. It'll attempt to register itself as "Bon Echo" (the development codename for 2.0; community builds of the program cannot officially be called "Firefox"). This way you can run Stipespeed in parallel with the original install; if you don't like it, you can always delete it and revert to the original by running the original application from its own directory. And since user preferences are stored in the user profile and not with the application, it's all the more convenient.
[Note: Vista users, you'll need to run Stipespeed as Administrator to get it to register as the default web browser.]
One of the things I've always found problematic about Firefox (even though I'm quite fond of it in general) is how it's not possible to launch FF windows in their own processes. All FF windows are shared by the same, single instance of the firefox.exe image, so if one crashes, they all crash.
I did some digging and found out that it is possible to launch a new instance of Firefox in a separate process, but only if it uses a different profile. The reason for this, I suspect, is because the profile is locked for exclusive use by one instance of the program and can't (yet) be shared between instances.
If you have multiple profiles, though, and you want to use them side-by side, all you need to do is create a batch file to launch FF that way, like so:
@echo off
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
start firefox.exe -p
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=0
This sets the MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment variable, which FF uses to detect if it's supposed to launch in a new process or not. When it launches, though, it'll ask you what profile you want to use; if you attempt to use the profile that's currently in use, it'll forbid it.
I should point out that if FF 2.0 crashes, it does attempt to re-open the windows you had open at the time when you next launch the program. This is at least partial compensation for not having multiple instances, but it's still not quite the same thing.
