9/1/08

Firefox 3.0.1 (Mac OS X version) Preliminary

This afternoon, I finally decided to start some testing of Firefox 3, I've been putting it off for ages now, and with the frequent notices by Firefox about how version 3.0.1 is available (as well as the fact that the Firefox people have made it to version 3.0.1 already) I decided to give it a shot.

The way I work with new releases like this, I start by using the Mac OS X version of the software, where backing up old programs and demoing new versions is so much easier than in Windows (and lets not even talk about how hard that is to do in Linux), but I found something interesting while using the browser in Mac OS X 10.4.11: the menu bar repeats itself. On Mac, you should see something that looks like this:

[click the image below to see a full-sized version]

But, what I'm seeing with Firefox 3.0.1 is a bit different than usual Apple interface standards:

[click the image below to see a full-sized version]

The items seem to "slide" -- sometimes, the "Firefox" item is the furthest to the left, other times, "Help" or "Window" or "File" will be furthest to the left.

Presently, closing and reopening the browser has not helped the software out. I'll keep tinkering with the software, perhaps Firefox 3.0.1 isn't quite ready for Mac OS X 10.4.11 yet. I'll keep running it for now, and maybe I'll find something out there on the MozillaZine that will help out.

[update]
Since restarting the MacBook, Firefox has worked just fine. It seems restarting the software several times was not the root cause of the issue... Something must have been running resident in memory that needed to be cleared out before the menu bar would work correctly.

Still a strange error, one that I've never encountered before in the many years that I've been running Mac OS (from System Software 7 to OS X 10.5).

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