Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Blogger, only like Percy Jackson

Okay, confession time. (yeah, that's from Percy Jackson. I'm reading them again - out of order). I've totally been a lazy bum on my blog, and on Computer Dictionary. But good news - I'm probably back in the blogosphere. If you're named Zeb, that's an xkcd reference. So, um, just wanted to let you all know that.
Firefox 4 came out recently, which is really exciting. I basically fell in love with it as soon as I found out, which was back when it was still in mockups. I was SO excited, actually, that I did some research (poking around if you like) and concluded that the only way to get it and try it was to get a nightly. As it was still in mockups, there actually was no alpha version. Now, you techy people know that alpha versions are like the very earliest software, right? Before betas and stuff. They're even more dangerous that betas, which tend to be fairly stable, but inherently risky - especially if you're dealing with something like an operating system - and they (alphas) tend to be buggy, weird and often enough not polished software. Well, you would be wrong.
A nightly is often known as bleeding edge code, bleeding edge software or bleeding edge builds. No actual blood, I promise, just as long as the software doesnt have blood in it. Oh, nevermind. This is getting disgusting. Anyway, a nightly is a version of the software that's generally built every night, usually by a script, then published, hence the name. It goes through absolutely no Quality Assurance, and isn't even guaranteed to run. Oh yeah. To represent this status, Mozilla brands the Firefox nightlies (nightlies.mozilla.org) as "Minefield". Isn't that nice.
I followed Firefox 4 for a long time, and I must say it's brilliant. Mozilla has really outdone themselves. Get it at mozilla.com - it's uber awesome. Go on!
- Alex

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