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Firefox 0.9 is out! This is one of the promotional buttons.

I installed it "from scratch", finally deleting all my old profiles (I had at least 3: Firefox, Phoenix, and Mozilla). Used the Windows installer, which went really fast. Like any change, the new default theme will take a little getting used to.

In the "learn something new every day" department, you can middle-click on a tab to close it. Nice that I don't have to go all the way over to the Close Tab button for this any more, since I hardly ever have less than 5 tabs open at once.

I also started experimenting with PEAR. Turns out that my version of PHP (from the Windows installer) didn't come with it out of the box, so I spent WAY too long trying to get the zip version of PHP working with Apache2. Everything failed miserably.

I recalled hearing about WAMP packages (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP), and had poo-poo'd them at the time as being too hand-holding. Amazed at how quickly I changed my tune once I had problems getting my work done, I tracked ddown a few (thank you, hotscripts!), and landed on XAMPP. Check out this feature list:

Apache 2.0.49, MySQL 4.0.20a, PHP 4.3.7 + PEAR, MiniPerl 5.8.3, mod_php 4.3.7, mod_ssl 2.0.49, Openssl 0.9.7d, PHPMyAdmin 2.5.7, Webalizer 2.01-10, Mercury Mail Transport System f�r Win32 und NetWare Systems v4.01a, FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.0, SQLite 2.8.13, ADODB 4.04.

Everything worked out-of-the-box. I'm really really really greatful I ran across this!

Just for the curious, here's the breadcrumb trail of neediness (Dave Barry would say that's a great name for a rock band): Vendor listing form for CRMA with 40-odd fields -> PEAR -> Newest PHP Zip -> XAMPP. PEAR has some great form generation stuff (QuickForm), and hopefully I'll start using the DB stuff also.

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