IT Professionals

Firefox 3 Has Not Impressed Me

Posted by on Mar 7, 2008 | 9 Comments

As shocking as this may be for some, I will not be upgrading to Firefox 3 anytime soon. Besides still opting to cater to Google over providing a real RSS management solution like Opera or IE7, the default url suggestion/auto-complete is hideous. Think I am nuts? Let me share a little history.

I started out as a user of the Mozilla browser shortly after it was initially released and eventually over to the browser known as “Firebird”, later to become Firefox. I rode out Firefox rough spots in the past, but I think that “goodness” all but came to a halt from v1.x on. Firefox 1 was a good browser, but version 2.x has been slowly heading down hill ever since.

Now to be fair, I think that Firefox 3-beta certainly runs smoothly enough, but I have yet to see anything compelling enough to get me to upgrade to it anytime soon. Not because it is a poor browser, but simply because they have really not done a lot of good in improving the work-flow.

It’s the weekend, I’ll have time to read everything, hit the comments and tell me what you like or dislike about the latest version of Firefox 3-beta.

  • Jerry Tobias

    About Firefox 3:
    I tried it and, to my disappointment, none of the add-ons I had installed on Firefox 2 worked with the upgrade. It did seem to be a little faster than Firefox 2, but not worth the loss of all the add-ons.

  • Ron Busquet

    I tried Firefox Beta 3 ver 4.42.0.0. and experienced Add-ons problems as well. I also found it to be extremely slow and took far to long to load. I will stay with ver 2 or else will be considering changing back to the dreaded MSIE or something else.

  • clint fingerlow

    I have been using Firefox for a few years and have recommend it to all who are interested in not using explorer.Firefox 3 does nothing for me and I can’t get rid of the history in the address bar. Anyone who types “www” in the address bar is able to see all sites I have visited. I have run “Ccleaner”, “Zero Tracks”, and “Clean Up”, checked the forums, and googled the problem with no luck. This “feature” was enough to make me go back to Firefox 2.

  • Curran

    The OS specific interface is nice, but is nothing new, as that was available through ad-ons before.

    Additionally, the lack of compatible 2.x add-ons is a pain!

    As Jerry said, it does seem a little faster.

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/oztech/ oztech

    Agreed. A browser should be light and fluffy without all the bulk. I expect it to eventually go the way of Netscape.

  • Skyler

    While I agree, I don’t like how (don’t laugh) un-customizable Opera is. Just basic stuff, like the order of the task bars, just can’t be done easily on the new version of Opera like it can in Firefox 2. Opera does a lot of little weird things too, like how you have to hunt around inside the program to disable the built-in .torrent client (I use uTorrent, thank you very much) or the way it handles downloads.

    Firefox isn’t perfect but at least it’s friendly. I think Opera is a little stalinist sometimes. :p

  • http://delltuxlamp.no-ip.org TitaniumTux

    Sure, FireFox 3 has extension compatibility issues, but this is nothing new.

    I liked FireFox 2 over 1.5 because I actually made 1.5 act more like FireFox 2 before version 2.x became available (for instance having a “close tab” button on each tab instead of on the right-side of the tab bar). When I upgraded (even after FireFox 2′s release date), not all extensions I had been using were compatible yet. Some extensions were never made compatible with FireFox 2.x and these extensions either became obsolete or were replaced with similar extension that do the same things but were written for more a recent version of FireFox. I required fewer extensions for FireFox 2.x because it already behaved more to my likings than version 1.5. I generally avoid using beta versions of browsers (unless it’s a beta for their first version if I feel I must try the browser), considering the lack of support for certain extensions and plug-ins such as media players and Flash/Gnash.

    FireFox is not yet released (at the time of this comment). It can only be assumed that not all extensions would be compatible with version 3. Even upon release, I am willing to bet that many extensions will still not be compatible and some extensions never will be.

    I like all “hard” changes to the user interface, what I mean by that would be changes one could not easily revert to without extensions (OS integration is great… I no longer feel like I’m using a foreign app). The “home” link was not a “hard” change; a home page button can be added to the toolbar just like it can be removed from/added to the toolbar in other versions. Having the homepage in the bookmarks bar is neat… some people might like it (and those who don’t can easily revert).

    The cons to FireFox 3 are no big deal… dropping support for Windows 98 makes sense (it’s not worth the programming effort to make it compatible) and those who wish to continue using such old computers should use a lightweight Linux distro (it’s supported, and unlike in Windows 9x, FireFox 3 is fully compatible with Linux), moving the homepage link is a “soft” change and can easily be reverted, and new features don’t seem to act at the cost of performance. FireFox 3 is definitely a step in the right direction, however anyone who cares for their incompatible extensions or likes to view web content in Flash should wait for the release.

  • Guy Thomas

    Come on folks, you are talking about a beta release here! I’ve been testing Firefox 3 for a couple of weeks and I have to say it is amazing. Its ACID2 compliant (and gets a good ACID3 score to boot). Also, its fast – super super fast in fact! The interface doesn’t seem cluttered at all and its also very easy to use. Complaining about add-ons not working is just plain dumb – its a BETA release, what do you expect? Being a web developer, I just can’t see why anyone would want to go back to IE after using any Firefox browser. Any IE supporter should think about the following questions carefully.
    Do you really want to support a monopoly? Do you really want your web browser to incorrectly display pages? Do you really want your web browser to be integrated into your OS so when it gets hacked your OS is hacked too? Do you really want the future development of your browser to be heavily influenced by an OS agenda?

  • John S

    Firefox 3 tries to be all things to all people and loses its status for me as a good all around browser. FF3 is something even Microsoft would think twice about doing.
    Sure its fast but it does add flash and baggage where it was not really needed. I really don’t know who was screaming for a big make over? I would have been happy with faster rendering. As simple as Safari is it does what its suppose to do and without a lot of extra. Too bad Apple does not offer ad ons which I personally don’t use but it would definitely appeal to many.