I love that it actually sends your login information before asking whether or not it should remember your password. I hate it when I would click “yes” only to discover it was an incorrect password, now saved and auto-completing every time I visit a favorite page. Brilliant work.

So far, I am very impressed. I had stayed away from Linux for years, primarily because I didn’t have nor want to spend the time it would take to tweak everything into submission enough to actually have a complete system for daily use. But I see now that things have definitely improved since the “early days.”

There’s still a fair amount of tweaking to be done, mostly in the realm of simply finding the right applications for my daily tasks, plus the learning curve of getting used to a new system. But the big stuff worked right out of the box: I didn’t have to do a thing to use my wireless network or video card. It only took a few clicks to get Beryl installing and running (though several hours were spent figuring out just what I was doing first). The installation program even let me shrink my Windows partition by 20 gigs without destroying anything. Getting DVDs to play took a little more work, but I blame that more on our country’s ridiculous laws than any fault of Ubuntu — they cannot include the codecs in the distribution for legal/financial reasons, but they are available for free download.

I’m still not sure what this will do to my development workflow, since I still need Windows for Adobe CS, and the font set doesn’t match the rest of the world (though it is more comprehensive than I would have guessed). I suppose I’ll know soon enough.

Firefox

This one proved to be a piece of cake, thanks to Stuart Colville. In XP, simply download and install Firefox portable, port over your user profile, and then install version 2.

The only drawback is that (on windows) you cannot run the two at the exact same time. That was easier than I expected; let’s see how well our favorite Microsoft application complied.

Internet Explorer

This one didn’t look so easy. At first, I could only find comments on various articles saying “try this, I would expect it to work” posted by folks who were apparently not quite daring enough to try out their methods their own machines. I let another several days pass, and then poked around again to see what kind of solutions had presented themselves.

I came across an IE7 Standalone Launch Script, and another one over here but it was (a) primarily for the beta release (at the time), and (b) somewhere in there I came across a comment about how without a full IE7 install, you could conceivably wind up with a strange version 6/7 hybrid installed on your machine *shudder*. That certainly defeats the purpose of testing for webpage development.

The most promising solution I found came up in the comments of a post over on Robert Nyman’s site: go ahead with a full install of 7.0, and then add in a standalone of version 6. Tredosoft.com has a really nifty multiple-version application allowing you to install all major releases of IE since version 3. So I downloaded the full meal-deal from Microsoft and let the installation commense. (And let me tell you, IE7 is ugly… what’s with the menu bar being under the address bar? And why is it hidden by default?)

For the most part, Tredosoft’s installation works. However, it won’t handle cookies, so if you need to do testing on a page with a user logon, this isn’t going to be your ultimate solution. But at least it’s better than nothing.