Yup, hot on the heals of IE7, Firefox 2 hit the street today. Sporting a swanky new… well cleaner UI and a bunch of productivity enhancements this is the browser I’ve been waiting for.

I’ve been running the beta version alongside version 1.5 for a couple of weeks now (which while a little clumsy, was no where near the pain-in-the ass multi-IE is) and I gotta say, I like it… a lot! It’s clean, it’s fast, and most importantly… it hasn’t broken anything yet!

Extensions and themes are now collectively referred to as “Add-ons” and managed through a unified control panel, and at time of writing a few have yet to be upgraded for compatibility with Firefox 2 (nothing that can’t be fixed with the use of the the Nightly Tester Tools add-on which allows you to force compatibility), but most of the main extensions work out of the box and the new UI theme is so nice that for the moment at least I don’t want to change it!

The options control panel has changed a bit too and it took a little while to find everything again but on the whole it looks like all the changes are for the good and I would certainly recommend the upgrade. So what are you waiting for? Go get it now!

As I’ve been a bit starved of design work at my day job of late I thought I would take the opportunity to vent my creative spleen by creating a fancy pants new design for the Concept Fusion blog as well as finally getting my portfolio site up.

Look out on November 1st (CSS Reboot day) for the first stage of the new design, with the portfolio to follow soon after. Sneek peek below:

I can SO relate to this, having long been a double digit coffee drinker!

Having recently cut down to a single cup in the morning followed by Jasmine Tea for the remainder of the day and I have to say, I feel considerably better for it.

Looks like Internet Explorer 7 is officially out in the wild!

The large software company I work for has rolled out an official IE7 blocker as several of our key enterprise apps don’t work with it, so it looks like I’ll be sticking to testing inside of a VM.

Ironic isn’t it that an “Upgrade” stands to break so many existing apps… hopefully things will improve in the coming weeks/months as developers (like myself) work to bring sites an applications in line with these new fangled web standards things (insert sarcasm smiley here!). I’ve just upgraded to the latest Firefox 2 release candidate from Firefox 1.5 and while it probably doesn’t change anywhere near as much as IE7 does from IE6 it also doesn’t break anything… at least yet!

Two new browsers… interesting times lay ahead!