I was browsing around the Sencha site this morning and saw that they announced the beta release of 3.3 which includes two major new components:
While those will garner much attention, the ugly stepchild mentioned at the bottom of the press release is also very cool. The ActionColumn allows you to put icons inside a grid with an accompanying event handler.
This is something we use quite a bit in Flex, and its addition to ExtJS is exciting.
I never thought I’d see the day when this happened, but it has happened.
Remember when Firefox came out? It was revolutionary. It was completely standards-based. You could extend it with all kinds of cool tools. It was fast and lightweight. It had nice extras that really helped Web developers build and debug sites a lot faster.
Well, those days are gone. Firefox is now sluggish and memory intensive, easily taking up 200MB+ of memory within minutes of opening it and over 300MB+ when I’m testing. It takes between 6-15 seconds to start up, depending on how many checks it has to perform on my whopping 4 extensions I pruned it down to.
Now the era of Google Chrome begins.
When I launch Chrome, it’s up an running in less than one second, and it’s Javascript engine is so ridiculously fast that my home page – which is now set to iGoogle – renders in about two seconds. For a while, the only thing holding me back from making Chrome my default browser was that I couldn’t use Firebug or Roboform, the two extensions that everyone should have. Well, everyone should have Roboform, and every Javascript developer should have Firebug.
Now that both of those extensions exist for Chrome, there’s absolutely no reason to have Firefox on my box anymore.
As Russ S. and Jason Dean note in the comments, the Firebug extension for Chrome is the Lite edition. However, the Developer Tools that are built into Chrome fill in the gaps that are missing from Firebug Lite, and in a slightly more attractive interface to boot.
If you haven’t played around with the Developer Tools in Chrome yet, you absolutely need to give it a shot.
My 2004 self would have bet the farm that I would not be uninstalling Firefox just 5.5 years later.
Oh, and I highly recommend that you download the latest beta of Chrome. The Javascript speed enhancements alone are worth it.