My collaborators know well that I often refer to Mozilla’s current flagship browser as “Failfox”. Many have read what I’ve got to say about several versions of Mozilla Firefox before. A few also know my stance on the foundation’s trademark policies and their sole existence.

Yet I can’t bring myself to hate this awesome browser that’s still superior to Google Chrome in user interface design as far as I am concerned.

After switching to Iceweasel/Firefox 3.6 from Debian experimental a couple of months ago — after learning of its status at the website of one of the maintainers’ — I have had a pleasing and stable experience with Firefox that I’d not had since 3.0 was released. Now I’m also beta-testing Firefox 4 for Windows on my XP SP3 virtual machine, and awaiting the future stable release.

I thought I’d clarify this for those who might have thought I was yet another Firefox-hater, based on my previous rants. Of course, it’s a bit jarring that it took Mozilla and/or Debian so long to stabilize Firefox on amd64 systems, but I guess you can’t ask for more — it mostly is, after all, a volunteer-driven effort, and amd64 builds had not appeared before in the official FTP server until the Firefox 4 betas, for some reason.