Quite often, thanks to the ranks of tweaks and hacks that many people on the Internet post, you can get a bit of software to work better, faster, or whatever. However from time to time, it just totally fails.

I’ve had the experience with the optimised Firefox builds that are regularly posted by Neil Lee. I’ve been using these for a while, as they are compiled for specific processors, and as such are generally faster than the regular Mac version of Firefox. As Neil says on his site all he’s doing is just recompiling the existing Firefox build, which made my odd problem with the new version all the more strange.

A look at the release notes for the latest version, 1.5.0.1 show that this is a pretty minor bug fix release, and the official release looks and runs exactly the same as before. However the same can’t be said for the optimised build, which has a fundamental problem with the Bloglines site – a bit of a problem as that is one of the major sites I use to track over 100 different blogs and feeds. The problem is that the new build doesn’t function correctly with the frame based feeds page – whereas the standard build quite happily allows you to click a feed in the left hand frame and shows you the latest updates on the right, the optimised build doesn’t do this – instead it generates a new, blank tab, and never shows you the feed.

Anyway, I’m sure if it’s a pretty common problem it will be sorted out quite quickly, but until then I’m back to the slow old standard release – not that it doesn’t work, it’s just a bit like the difference between the courtesy car you get when your car is in being repaired, and the car you’re used to!