Firefox Developer Edition

I run a lot of browsers – I’ll usually have 3-4 running, a mix of Chrome, Canary, Safari, and Firefox Nightly. With Mavericks, I switched to Safari as my default browser on my MBA due to its power efficiency.  Unfortunately, Yosemite breaks the SIMBL plugin I was dependent on, so it was time to move on.

Chrome has been getting sluggish and I’ve really been liking what Firefox has been up to, but the latest Nightly builds have been not so dependable (I blame e10s but maybe that’s unfair) and since I’m traveling again, daily 90MB downloads isn’t ideal, so I decided to give Firefox Developer Edition a shot.

Turns out, it’s pretty great! It has a dark simple, theme, by default. Is pretty snappy, and the developer tools look great (although at this point I’m so used to Chrome’s keybindings that it’s been a bit awkward switching).

The one fly in the ointment was that 1Password wasn’t playing nice. Luckily, there is a solution. Just upgrade to the latest beta extension and the latest beta version of the app and it’ll work.

If you use Evernote, you’ll also want the beta Clipper that brings it to parity w/ Chrome and Safari.

Lastly, one of the things that I really got spoiled by was Chrome’s particularly elegant “hold CMD-Q to quit” option. While, ever so slightly less elegant, meta-q-override/warn-before-quit does the trick.

I’m currently using Firefox Developer Edition as my new default browser.