I don't normally live dangerously. I wear my seat belts and follow the labels on my prescription bottles with religious care. That said, stick an alpha or beta edition of an open source app in front of me, and I'm honor-bound to try it out -- within reason, of course.

Right now I have no less than three versions of Firefox running on this machine: the stock 3.0.3 release; a "no-install" version of the 3.1 beta 2 pre-release nightly build (updated daily), and Flock 2.0 (which counts in my book since it was derived from Firefox's code). This alongside copies of Opera, Google's Chrome, and of course IE -- although at this point I don't use IE for much save NetFlix Watch Now.

Why do all this? For one, it gives me an idea of what the quality of the nightly builds are like for a given project, when such builds are available. Firefox's nightlies are remarkably solid -- not one of them has burped on me in the course of even remarkably heavy use, although I don't use the nightlies for things like accessing my bank account.

It's also interesting to watch a program evolve on a day-to-day basis. I've tried out the new "privacy mode" function in Firefox, but I like better the way it's implemented in Chrome (as "incognito browsing") -- it's less disruptive, and I think that's a reflection of the fact that Chrome was engineered from the ground up and inside-out to be a breed apart. I'm hoping FF makes this feature a bit more flexible, making it possible to browse incognito and out-cognito side-by-side instead of either/or.

I've also done the same sort of comparison tracking with OpenOffice -- run the 2.2 and 3.0 versions side-by-side to see what the differences are like up close. And in those cases, I've always worked on files that either had current backups or were themselves not originals, since with any nonrelease software the biggest risk isn't crashing but data corruption. You can always recover from a crash, but if some irreplaceable file is mangled you're in much deeper swampwater.

Two more apps I've been running from nightlies are other products that use Mozilla code: the Songbird music player and the new 3.0 branch of Thunderbird. Songbird just went to a 1.0 release candidate and I'm in the middle of trying that out right now so more on that a little later. The Thunderbird 3 alpha seems stable enough, but it's going to be hard to really see how it sizes up against Outlook until the calendaring and contact-management portions of it are rolled in for real.

If you're using open source software from a nightly repository, sound off below, and let me know what your experiences have been like.

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