On my work and home PC’s I use Firefox… period. There is no better browser. The only thing that really irks me, however, is how slowly it starts up on my 400 MHz Pentium II running Windows 2000 at work. Since the FFX team won’t implement Mozilla Suite’s “Turbo Mode”, then to get around it, I usually just leave the download manager open and minimized so that whenever I need to open a browser window, it opens super-fast.

The Mac platform just doesn’t work the same. I suppose I could just leave the app open, but I have a habit of quitting apps when I’m done with them. Because it always takes Firefox so much longer to start up than Safari, usually I just use Safari for normal surfing, and only open Firefox if I need to do something that requires better JavaScript/DOM/XML/Whatever support than Safari provides.

But today I came across something very, very cool. Firefox builds that are optimized for the PowerBook G4. Instead of waiting the usual 6-7 Dock bounces for Firefox to start up, it only takes one, and everything else about it is significantly faster than the default builds.

I came across the forum for optimized builds over at MozillaZine.org. Here is some linkage:

• Firefox optimized for OSX on a G4.
• Firefox optimized for Panther (OSX 10.3.x) on a G5
• Other Firefox builds optimized for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Firefox is now running zippier than ever on my PowerBook. I hope these’ll help you out!