Beta Lovin’

I’m what you might call an “early adopter.” I’m kinda obsessed with being on the cutting edge when it comes to technology. I’m always excited when I piece of software that I use is updated – it’s always a rush to explore the new features and functionalities. What’s even better is when software developers make pre-release versions available for the public to test. These “alphas,” “betas,” and “release canidates” are unfinished products and often buggy, but they give those of us brave enough to try them a first glance at new features, as well as an opportunity to provide feedback to the developers. I’m currently using a few “beta” releases that I’m really enjoying:

  • I recently installed the Release Candidate of the next version of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 7. There’s been a lot of positive buzz going around about Windows 7, in vast contrast to all the negative press surrounding Vista’s release a few years ago. I installed the Release Candidate on a separate hard drive to test it out without tampering with my Vista installation, and have been using it almost exclusively for the past couple weeks. Even though it’s not considered “stable” by Microsoft, it seems to me to be quite rock solid. It’s not a huge departure from Vista, but there are some cool new features and it promises to be more stable and not as much of a resource hog as it’s predecessor.
  • Once I had Win 7 installed, my first move was to download my favorite browser, Firefox. I figured since I was testing a pre-release OS, I might as well test out a pre-release browser as well, so I grabbed the 3.5 beta 4 version of Firefox. Some of the new features include faster JavaScript rendering, private browsing, and improved tab management and recovery. Other than the occasional crash, the only downside of running the beta is that many of my extensions are not yet compatible.
  • Finally, today I upgraded the software that runs this blog to the 2.8 beta 2 version of WordPress. I’ve only had it installed for a few hours, so I can’t really make a judgment about it yet, but I’m excited about some of the new features.