You can, for Chrome there is the beta and dev channels. I use beta chrome which I rarely have issues with. Dev chrome is very unreliable, and it should be, since it's the latest and least tested revision of the software. For IE- well no there is only a preview for IE10 which isn't a full browser (at least last I checked) so your right there.

Wow Facebook? I haven't used Opera for a long time but I'm going to look into this. User agent sniffing is a plague and it should be dealt with accordingly. GOOD web developers don't do that unless it's absolutely necessary.

Agreed, and I tend to be very liberal when allowing ads, because that's how these services stay afloat...

Actually no, the Chrome you are running is stored in your user directory.

I feel your pain- Mozilla is definitely not used to this sort of release model - and yes, the amount of negativity over it is indicating that. But it's growing pains -- the whole point of having major versions is so you can progressively move bugfixes and features from the latest and most unstable version up to the stable as those become proven. I guess Mozilla's just doing a shitty job of it right now.

I am definitely not speaking to Java/Flash breaking -- and yes they *are* real web technologies. They are not GOOD web technologies, but they are still necessary. But are you saying that every time Mozilla releases a Firefox, everyone who uses Java or Flash have to go and do real work to get it working again? No, your saying that there's a chance stuff like this could break- which is Mozilla's responsibility, not ours as web developers. If it's obvious that Mozilla is going to fix the problem - eventually - then tell your users to use a different browser until then if they want it to work. A lot of developers seem to think that their website MUST WORK at every second of every day on every browser version that someone could possibly ever try. Just write to the standards, make exceptions when necessary, and when a bug happens, don't sweat it that much- just educate your users!

It should not! They are all supposed to implement the same HTML! If you write your website *properly*, staying as close to the standards as you can, it will show up almost perfectly on all the latest versions of the major browsers. That's simply true. Javascript frameworks which deal with IE-specific ways of doing things are still necessary unfortunately, using one like jQuery means you should be able to upgrade the library without needing to rewrite parts of your site as IE evolves to become more standards-compliant. Use browser sniffing for HTML though, only when absolutely necessary. Perhaps due to bugs, improper/missing implementation of the standards, etc. Don't just jelly on user sniffing so you can target whatever browserX-only features you want. Besides, each time you branch your site your adding that much identical maintenance work, that should be obvious.

Also, if you visit chrome://gpu/ within Chrome, it will show you what is hardware accelerated and what's not. Just learned that today!

Ooohhh thank you- I had to wade more than half way through the comments to find someone with a proper head on their shoulders. STANDARDS, people. And start getting rid of these user agent sniffers - in most cases they are simply the *incorrect* way to solve the problem, not the *only* way.

Both Chrome and Firefox use hardware acceleration to render pages using all the horsepower of your video cards. If anyone is to blame out of the three parties you listed, it *IS* ATI. That being said, a blue screen could come from any driver in your system, conflicts between drivers, or from other parts of Windows. Any of those could be the culprit. As for why it happens in Firefox and not Chrome, there are 2 possibilities. For one, Chrome may implement it's acceleration in an entirely different fashion (and probably does). As it turns out, there are many ways to solve a problem especially when talking about OpenGL. The other possibility is that Google found out about the issue (either through direct testing or feedback) and blacklisted your drivers, so that hardware acceleration is not used.

Believe me, you *want* hardware acceleration. If Chrome is not using it because of your bad drivers, you are probably missing out on a better Web.

Also, when most well-informed people make a complaint such as yours, they often mention that they performed one (or several) driver updates to attempt to remedy the problem. You do know that you can upgrade your graphics drivers right? Have you tried this?

HERE is the real crux of the matter! I think people need to stop blaming auto updates and start blaming bad release management.

I don't think *anyone* really wants that. I thought web developers (and indeed users who were punished for choosing alternative browsers) came to a consensus about user-agent sniffing being generally bad, and that such techniques should only be used as a very last resort.

If the website developer would have stuck more to the standards, maybe his website (which surely uses crufty, legacy proprietary feature X, probably with dumb user agent sniffing) would have worked better in the newer (and in all likelihood more standards compliant) version of the browser.

No wonder Firefox's market share is dwindling- I don't understand how anyone uses the Web when the menu bar doesn't even look nice while the window isn't in focus! It seems like the only way to use such a menu bar would be to click on it! What kind of menu bar requires clicking!?

Everyone complains about Firefox's automatic updates. I hope they aren't complaining about the actual automatic updates, but instead the way they are done currently in Firefox (most annoyingly, the need to hit UAC to perform the update in Windows). Automatic updates are not bad! Web developers rejoice because of them -- we hope it will prevent stupid users from sticking with an outdated web browser and then complaining about how their websites don't work anymore.

I think we are all tired of supporting five or six versions of X browser. Auto updates mean we target the "stable" channel of each browser. Web standards are much better implemented today, and automatic updates will feed that, too. If automatic updates were bad, Google would have turned it off for Chrome, and Firefox and Microsoft never would have adopted it.

Don't forget that old software has *security vulnerabilities*, you know, if you don't want your personal details splayed across the web for the malicious to pray on. Having automatic updates keeps you protected.