I can finally use FireFox 3
I finally got FireFox 3 installed this morning, and I’m giving it a good workout.
There were a couple minor annoyances in plugin installations. I had to manually find some of my fave plugins (with one exception noted below) on the mozilla.com site, and upgrade them one by one, since the updater doesn’t seem to be working properly for all plugins (though maybe it’s just the jump from 2.x to 3 that makes that happen on some.) The ones I’m specifically talking about are Colorzilla, and Firebug. This was especially irksome since the mozilla.com site search doesn’t seem to recognize the search strings “colorzilla” or “ColorZilla” or “Colorzilla” or “Color” or “Color Picker” or “color picker” as having anything to do with this plugin, which is located here. I had to use “site:addons.mozilla.org ColorZilla” in google to find it. Is that an irony or what?
Aardvark, which is one of my favorite web dev debugger plugins has been updated but requires a trip to Rob’s site to download it, since the powers that be at mozilla.com have yet to review it. I had written to him on download day, and he very sweetly notified me when the plugin was updated this morning (Thank you, Rob!)
My initial impressions are that firefox 3 is a lot faster at loading pages. That’s wonderful. Even more wonderful is it’s so significantly faster that I can notice it on my already fast broadband connection.
I am less than thrilled with the changes in the bookmark interface though. It now takes me three clicks to do what I used to do with only one or two clicks. So file this one under “Why did you fix something that wasn’t broken?”
The “Awesome Bar” is not. It’s a bit annoying, but not so much that I want to download the plugin to revert to the oldbar, at least not yet. It’s been mentioned by a few people on the dev lists that this is a “trainable” bar and becomes significantly more useful after it learns your habits. So I’ll give it a go for awhile. If it still annoys me in a week or so, I’ll revert it.
In looking to see if there was an add-on to revert the bookmarks interface it took me a lot longer to find the link within the add-on interface to the Mozilla webpage that has add-ons listed. Seems to me a couple versions ago it was right on the bottom of the add-on window and could be clicked immediately after opening tools/add-ons. Now they show me lame “suggestions” first, which are so far from my reality that it’s ludicrous, then they make me poke around for the damn link, which is buried at the bottom of a scrolling menu. Stupid and unfriendly. If anyone knows of a skin or something that solves that issue, please let me know.
In general FF3 is good, no slowdowns with my max number of windows open, no surprises yet (though I have yet to get TOO crazy with it!) But those few changes in the GUI are not what I would call optimal, though they weren’t nasty major changes like the ones that pissed me off in IE7. The bookmarks thing is pissy though. I wish I could revert that.
The upgrade/installation went very smoothly, with the exception of the plugin thing noted above, and some of them did upgrade fine.
So I’m reserving judgment until after I’ve made the rounds of the fiddle sites and gotten a lot of flash and quicktime animations and scripty things running and see if I get the crashes I used to get while doing all this in many multiple windows.
I do think that Mozilla Firefox’s GUI Design team should keep in mind that making people click three times to get to something they used to be able to do with one click is a STEP BACKWARDS, not forwards. And there are two places that I’ve found so far that do that. We’ll see if I find others as I use this more.
Technorati Tags: FireFox 3, FireFox Add-Ons, Aardvark, Mozilla GUI design
