Firefox 2 alpha released

For those who seriously live on the bleeding edge of technology, the next version of Firefox is available for download as an alpha release. While we're great fans of Firefox at PC Rescue, we don't trust beta software, let alone alpha releases. We'll leave that to people like Charles Wright at Bleeding Edge who actually looks forward to the pain involved.

Apparently the Mozilla people are less than happy with this being publicised. Their view is this is just another nightly release as part of the software and they'll announce an official alpha when they are good and ready.

Continuing the theme of early adopters, Slashdot reports the recall of nearly 12,000 plasma screens. The linked USA Today article goes on to point out a whole list of recent high tech snafus. The point being (I think) that technology companies are rushing products to market.

There's certainly more than an element of truth here. One of the banes of running an IT support company is the amount of software and hardware that fails to come anywhere near meeting what was promised. The competitive pressures seems to favour rushing new stuff to market, regardless of any bugs in the product.

The rapidly changing market also messes up retailers. I was chatting to a salesman at Harris Technology about this last week, he was complaining about the confusing and rapid changes in the desktop and laptop market. You can't be too optimistic with your stock levels when the manufacturers are going to supersede everything within two months.

I guess another issue is just how long the manufacturers keep spare parts for these things. That's another reason why a three-year manufacturers warranty is essential for state of the art equipment. At least that way the manufacturer carries some risk.