I’ve always loved Firefox however in recent months I’ve cast this cute little animal into the refuge pile in /Applications and given its space in the warmth of my dock to Apple’s Safari 4 browser.  Firefox had developed a very naughty habit of eating all of my poor laptops free memory and CPU so when Apple came out with Safari 4 I decided to give it shot.

Safari is remarkably faster than the prior versions of Firefox and had a much lower memory and CPU footprint on my laptop.  The browser offered many other nifty features that I loved the glitz of when switching but over the past few months have all but forgotten as I never use them.  Such toys as “Top Sites” and “Graphical History” while being very interesting features don’t serve one well when they never use the “Top Sites” and barely ever check their browser history.

Today a friend mentioned how much he was enjoying Firefox 3.5 and I decided it was worth a shot to install on my work issued Windows laptop.  I replaced Firefox 3.0 with 3.5 and found it remarkably faster, sharper looking and much better with sharing the small amount of memory my work laptop has.  Since I was so impressed with it on the work computer I decided to give it a shot on my personal computer.

I installed the browser and after just about twenty minutes of usage noticed how much faster it was than prior versions.  It was as fast or faster than Safari 4.  The rendering is quicker than it used to be and Firefox’s use of large fonts has always been the most superior out there.  The results are in

Firefox has found it's rightful home

So now I am back on Firefox and quite happy with the performance thus far.

PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
983 firefox-bi  12.1% 13:59.60  24   249   1148  120M    52M   169M   577M

So now a question for all of you out there who actually read enough of this post to make it here.  Do you have any must have extensions I should look into?

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Wow, what a crazy few weeks it has been.  Kate and I have been very seriously considering moving onto the next steps of our lives for quite some time.  We both know the things we want to do and the goals we have for ourselves require us to be in a house and no longer in our condo.  While this place has been very good for us and we’ve turned it into an amazingly charming home we want a backyard that is our own, a kitchen that more suits are love for food, and more space for guests and our belongings.

Kate spent a lot of time doing some amazing research to determine the better towns for us to live in.  We wanted to stay within a good commute to the local area we are now as this is where most of the industry and jobs are should either Kate or I in the future be on the job market.  We further were interested in a town with a good community, lower crime rate, and a good school system.  We began viewing homes and figuring out what we liked, what we wanted, and what we absolutely had to have in our future home.

While doing this we also needed to prepare our condo for sale.  This required a lot of staging removing photos, personal items that others may not appreciate and removing all the clutter.  We had to rent a storage unit to put a lot of things that were taking up space and made our condo look smaller than it is.  Our place is now fully staged, we’ve had an open house and a couple appointments for people to walk through.  Still no offers but we have gotten positive feedback about the overall presentation

Buying a house is proving to be very stressful and time consuming.  We found a great home that we really wanted and put in an offer.  We then received a counter-offer to which we gave our own counter-offer.  We were then told that there were 3 total bidders being considered and we should give our last and final offer, which we did and won.  However only a few days later the sellers received another bid and again requested last and final offer.  This time we didn’t win and have lost the house.

It was heartbreaking and very depressing to both of us and we’re still angry every time we think about it; but we’re determined to find the right hosue for us.  We’ve since losing that house been through a few more houses with four more to see this week and hopefully one of them will become our home.

Keep your fingers crossed and send us good thoughts and wishes as we could really use the luck.

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