I have grown far more pragmatic in my old age, and now only put up with Beta versions of the following software:

• Software I am developing (hard to avoid)
• Open source projects where I am either an involved developer or at least intimately familiar with the internals and don't mind getting into the code.

But egged on by the fact that current development builds of firefox have built in SVG (like I'll ever need that) and that my pre-1.0 firefox is way out of date, I downloaded and installed (to a different directory) the latest nightly build of firefox (for linux) onto my (relatively out of date) redhat 9 box.

Rarely are you rewarded by beta versions with greater speed, but it is noticeably much faster. Even on my PIII sgi, firefox is starting to approach the speed of Internet Explorer (ducks).

I'll let you know how stable it is and how the nightly build of thunderbird are go.

Update: I can't actually *start* firefox now, but if I run the installer every time (about 40 seconds), it automatically starts firefox for me ;) It's quirky, but installing and launching together is still faster than launching my Firefox 1.0!!

Oh, and the occasional segfault...

Powerpoint makes you dumb -- [nytimes.com]

Edward Tufte : The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint -- [edwardtufte.com]

But his site runs AOLServer on linux server that hasn't been rebooted for nearly 400 days! Unfortunately linux uptime wraps at 497 (only the number - it doesn't randomly crash after 497 days, unlike the infamous Windows 95 and 98 bug that cause EVERY Win 95/98 box to crash after exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes and 47.296 seconds of continuous operation - if you could keep it up that long ;)

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.edwardtufte.com%2F