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20+ years of running "alpha quality" browser as my main web browser

 I have been accessing, using the internet since probably around 1991, using my dad's academic account and then schools and then home. I've used the internet before the web existed, sending emails, downloading freeware and sharewares from "huge" ftp repository. Sharing ftp site, using Usenet to find more and share more. This was a time you had to buy Ethernet NuBus card and install both Ethernet drivers and TCP/IP ones.

Then one day something called NCSA Mosaic came into the picture - this changed the way I consumed 'the network'. After a while some friends showed me Netscape, and mosaic faded away. I've used Netscape on Mac, Windows 3.11, NT, on workstations running Unix (hello Dec Alpha).

At the time my gig was either running OS/2, and Linux Slackware on my Pentium machine. I then got into the Beos world, and that was one OS that Netscape didn't ship binaries for. Microsoft had started pushing Internet explorer (IE). I was starting to work and *had* to use Windows. I came up with the idea of using Mozilla at work in order to find bugs that would later be fixed when I'd use it home on my favorite OS.

So I started using Mozilla builds for windows, and then following planet and mozilla.org to be aware of the process. I would now and then file bugzilla issues, often to discover they've been filled already :-) I clearly remember the day tabs were introduced. I walked around the room I was working in showing the great new feature to my colleagues that were using Mozilla. There were no formal releases, at the time CI-CD didn't exist completely yet, so you could keep the same version for a day or for a week depending on how broken the tree was

 

Then I continued using builds until updates became available, and I choose to use the nightly channel. At that time my motivation had changed, I had moved from dead BeOS to NeXTStep+1 aka Mac OS X. There was no way for me to help My then browser of choice Camino at work. Mac OS X was way less popular in the tech industry that it is now.

The web landscape was dominated by IE , the mac version was unfortunately different meaning that using it made a bunch of websites unusable. 

When Firefox got out, Camino started dying and I switched boats.

I then got employed by Mozillamessaging and used both Thunderbird and Firefox nightlies. I was the QA lead and there were no way I could test all the software and hardware combination used by our users. So crowd testing was very valuable to me.  At this point I had stopped reporting issues and the only thing I was reporting were crashes. 

Since 2010 a bunch of Chrome related browsers have started taking the web over, a bit like in 2006 when Microsoft was running the show, instead now google is.  I currently run 2 versions of Firefox, nightly for personal stuff and release for work related ones. I occasionally have to fire a chrome related browser because testing with Ff from the vendors is not being done (I'm looking at DocuSign and FoundryVtt ).

So running nightly software has not been a burden at all, because there are a few crashes here and there, but I always submit, so the stability team at Mozilla can investigate. The idea is that if it crashes on me, it won't crash on my Dad's computer because he runs releases. Once or twice in the course of those 20 years did I have to either reinstall or create a new profile. That's how stable nightly has been for me.

I'm annoyed at some of the decision Mozilla makes, but again they are the most independent browser maker out there with a big enough team to deal with the development surface of a browser. Hence, for some forseable future I'll be running nightlies in hopes of keeping the web open. I'm lurking at Servo and following it's development, reporting issues there because I see it has an alternative to Firefox, but it's far from being ready yet.

I'd encourage some of my readers to try/use Nightly. If you choose to do so, send in crash reports and enable telemetry.

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