Celebrate Download Day 2008, and help set a Guiness World Record by getting Firefox 3 on the day it drops.

As Firefox 3 nears completion, it’s shaping up to be leaner, faster, and more usable. The world’s best open source browser is maturing, and as part of the web community, you can get your Firefox on, and help it gain more mainstream exposure at the same time. So make it count — don’t be a slouch — pledge to get Firefox 3! And it doesn’t cost a thing, people…

If you haven’t met previously, let me introduce you two…

Maybe you’ve been designing websites for a month. Or maybe you’ve been at it for years. You’ve been using CSS for presentational markup with HTML, and you know how reliably pages tend to display when using a modern, standards-compliant browser like Firefox or Safari. And then you view your layout in the dreaded Internet Explorer 6. It’s blown to bits, kablooey, gobbledygook. You followed all the rules, but everything is misaligned, your margins are blown, your em-based font sizes are way off…

I have a riddle for you if you have the time.

Last week I found that my site was suddenly behaving differently in Firefox. Up until this point, it looked pretty much the same as Safari. But suddenly every piece of text had inexplicably become bold, and the spacing of my block-level elements was off. Way off. After some rapid refreshing in both browsers to see if something had momentarily glitched out and become cached, I realized the bug was much more permanent.

Thank heaven for Firefox and its myriad extensions.

Over the years, there have been a few extensions that I found critical, but haven’t been updated, X-Ray being chief among them. View Source Chart is another extension that keeps me from switching completely back to Safari. In order to use either of these I keep Nightly Tester Tools around for ensuring backward compatibility with these extensions that have fallen by the wayside…