Minefield blasted

OK. I have finally uninstalled Minefield from my laptop and it promptly removed all the bookmarks and passwords stored inside Firefox too! To be fair to the uninstaller, it did ask me if the bookmarks, etc. can be removed. I did not understand it because the installation folder was different, it would not touch the bookmarks or plugins under Firefox folder. But it did! :)

Is this an opportunity to restart my bookmarks from scratch (there were literally hundreds of them) or is it a bane? I don't know - it sure does irritate me to start typing all the URLs again :)

These plugins top my list:

1) Downthemall
2) Image-show-hide
3) All-in-one sidebar
4) Morning Coffee
5) ColorfulTabs
6) NoScript
7) Fast Dial
8) IE Tab
9) Chromifox

One more lover

The DSP exam is closing in but I felt it is time I gave out my verdict on Minefield. It did not score a perfect 10 but still got a decent 7+ on my scale.

I did notice some perceptible speed improvements compared to Firefox 3 and IE 7 [is it still in contention?!:-)] - for some of my favorite sites most notably google.

There is still some more support needed for my favorite firefox plug-ins and apart from the couple of crashes while watching the Vishy Anand vs Kramnik chess championship match on chess.com site, there were no hiccups with this browser.

So, one lover already in for this cutie of a browser ;) once the testing stage goes off and it launches in full-scale mode (still hoping plugin support by that time)

This ain't a bomb ...

Did you try 'Minefield' yet? It seems good! I would not put in the same league as its predecessor yet, since it is still in the alpha stage. But from what I have tried since this morning, there have not been any problems with it.

Oh, by the way, minefield is the next gen Firefox (yepp ... built from the same mozilla base by the mozilla team) with a supposedly ultra-speed Javascript engine. One site (arstechnica) even went to the extent of putting it 10 times faster than Google chrome's JS engine.

An advantage with installing Minefield is that it installs into a separate folder from Firefox. Most (not all) of the firefox plugins I had worked seamlessly with Minefield automatically. Even in the Windows Task Manager, the process appears as "firefox.exe". The bookmarks and form passwords I had saved in Firefox also got transferred automatically to Minefield.

FF's themes however are not yet supported in MF. So, am going to be in the testing mode for next 1 week and see how Minefield fares as against Firefox on user experience. In fact, to update this very blog am using Minefield now. Will update my findings later ...