Here's my extended review: Yuck.
Here's my concise review:
- The interface has barely changed, but the back button is now big and ugly for those who don't have a skin applied.
- My old skin wasn't supported. When I tried install a few other skins, they required me to register with Mozilla. Bad enough, except that the registration didn't work; they were supposed to send me an email to confirm my registration, but I never received it, even after asking them to send it again. (No, it's not in my spam bucket. Update: Got it several hours later.)
- Speaking of which, half of my plugins were also not supported. And they're not obscure plugins.
- The URL bar has a star icon to bookmark a page, but if you accidentally click it, good luck "unbookmarking" the page. It took me half a minute to figure out where the heck it went in the bookmarks. It's too much trouble to allow you to unbookmark a page by clicking on the same star? Update: see comments.
- There's a recently bookmarked menu, which replaces what used to be called "the bottom of the list". I organize my bookmarks, so I don't see the point.
- When I typed in part of a URL, I used to get back previous URLs that matched what I typed. Now I get back any page whose URL or title matches what I typed, and boy is it hard to find anything in that mess. It's now two lines per item, includes the favicon, and it's not ordered in any sensible way that I can discern. I now have to type is a whole lot more to find the item I need. And I didn't see any way to turn this "feature" off.
- Some people report that browsing is faster. I didn't notice this. Of course, I live in Israel, which may trump any gains that a browser provides.
And that's it. That's it? That's what they call a 3.0 release??? Back in the days, a whole number increase meant something. You young'uns are spoiled, I tell you.
Yehuda
12 comments:
Yehuda,
There is a way to get rid of he changes to the address ("awesome") bar. There is some information over on Download Squad on how to do it.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/06/17/dont-think-the-firefox-3-awesome-bar-is-awesome-heres-how-t/
Thanks, sean. There seems to be a disagreement on how exactly to implement this solution. I'll try it out later.
Yehuda
They lost me by only supporting OS X versions from 10.4. - I'm happily (well, actually, increasingly unhappily) running 10.3.9.
It seems faster to me, and I don't think it's just wishful thinking. I run a mac though, and it might just be that they brought it up to a Windows level of speed (Firefox has always run faster on windows comps than on macs because it was originally written for a windows system). I guess that's one of the things they fixed this release; they've been talking about it for a while.
The "Awesome Bar" pissed me off for the first few hours, but try leaving it on for a day or two. I found that the suggestions improve. I personally like the idea of an address bar that searches page titles as well as addresses... guess I'll see how convenient that turns out to be in practice.
You can remove a bookmark by clicking the star again then pressing the button "Remove Bookmark" on the popup that appears.
It's reasonably easy to remove a bookmark through the same star icon. Just click it again and hit "Remove Bookmark" in the pop-up. Not quite as simple as just re-clicking it, admittedly, but I guess they figured the functionality of editing a new bookmark to reclassify/tag it was more critical than the ability to remove it in a single click.
Thanks for the suggestions. I noticed that if you click an item that is already bookmarked, you get the Remove Bookmark button. But if you double click it, you don't!
I was double clicking it, and that's why I never saw the Remove Bookmark button.
Yehuda
Strange. The whole double-vs.-single-click model is irritatingly variable from program to program.
Odd. Perhaps because I watched an 'intro to new features' screencast I knew what to expect, and after trying it for myself I really like it. The browser is MUCH faster, especially with AJAX apps like Google Mail. Also, the memory footprint seems to be considerably smaller than 2.0 - I often would restart Firefox2 because it was using over 300 MB of RAM - FF3 seems to be using around 100 MB for the stuff I do.
I've been following Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox for about 12 years and based on the last couple of days I think this is the best web browser ever. I know that sounds fanboyish, but I really think it is.
Ok, ok, you win. I'll give it a few days to get used to it and see how it goes.
Yehuda
Sean,
I can confirm that changing the RichResults value doesn't return you to the old style bar. :-(
Yehuda
Yehuda,
You might find this useful:
http://lifehacker.com/396517/four-extensions-that-tweak-firefox-3s-awesomebar
There are other Firefox3 tweaks mentioned in other articles on that site too.
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