May 282008
Steve Yegge talked about programs that you don’t have to restart in his blog post on the Pinocchio Problem. Firefox is stable enough now, that the biggest need for restarts is messing with extensions (installing, enabling, uninstalling, disabling, updating).
You can do your own Firefox Extension Development after first setting up the environment. This gives you some ability to rework extensions without the Firefox restart. There is also a nifty extension boilerplate generator tool that can bootstrap that first extension in less than a minute.
More exciting is GreaseMonkey, where you can do a lot of damage without restarting. Greasemonkey scripts can then be turned into extensions after you have perfected them.