I’ve been putting off testing Minefield 3.7 again ever since an early version trashed my profile. Fortunately, I backed it up like a good RTFM’er but the experience turned me away from testing for a while.
I decided to grab today’s nightly build after seeing all the sensational coverage regarding tab position. My opinion? Not a big deal… there’s a little check box to revert the change.

Rather than making this the long and drawn out anti-TechCrunch post I had hazily envisioned, I’ll leave you with my path that led me to writing this post.

First, my uber-customized combination of various addons with Black Stratini created an unusable interface in this build. Rather than contributing anything useful to any related projects, I simply installed Office Black v1.5.1 by t-rane like any ‘normie’ would.

Next, I needed to disable compatibility checking for my essential-yet-neglected addons. This was easy enough since MR Tech Toolkit placed Boolean entries in my Firefox config some time ago.

extensions.checkCompatibility.3.7a = false

Next, I noticed that Greasemonkey had lost my scripts somehow. Rather than ignoring it like any ‘normie’ would, I cloned their git repo

http://github.com/greasemonkey/greasemonkey.git

and built it… (rename to greasemonkey-2010.06.29.beta.xpi, drag to Minefield window, restart)
greasemonkey-2010.06.29.beta

Voila, my GM scripts are back! Now I’ll install the appallingly underused TechCrunch Douchebag script from AlekseyKorzun, also available from github:

http://github.com/AlekseyKorzun/TechCrunch-Douchebag.git

and userscripts.org

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/77996

At this point I decided to write a little post about my experience. Then I noticed an interesting problem with the way minefield interacts with Windows 7 taskbar functionality. Basically, each open tab shows as an individual Firefox window in the taskbar, as shown in the first image of this post. This would be great, except that you can’t distinguish between a new window and a new tab. This is something that really ought to be addressed before release.

Overall though, I was impressed with this latest prerelease version. I will likely keep up with the latest build up until the next official point release.