First reactions: Firefox 3

Posted by Abhijith as Uncategorized

So I downloaded Firefox 3 after Mozilla servers were up after their embarrassing crash, contributed towards a world record, and installed it half-heartedly, not knowing what to expect.

First off were the icons, I didn’t like the big back button, I customised it to ’small icons’ to make it small.

Gmail opens considerably faster, sites with heavy scripts also load easily.

Memory consumption is also down a bit.

The Inspector and colour codes to the level of security on a site is a great idea, which will take time to get used to, but the lock at the end of the address bar for secure connections could’ve been retained.

Initially I thought the ability of selecting two words by clicking just in front of the second word was disabled, but on reading this blog I found that it has been slightly modified: you have to double click in front of the second word and then drag towards the first, making it possible to select text in a reversed order. The original option could’ve been retained as it was. Triple clicking inside a paragraph selects the entire paragraph, as opposed to that line alon in FF2.

As you will also read on the mentioned blog, you can select multiple blocks of text in Firefox 3.

I miss the ‘Go’ button, which I would use after editing the address. I’m waiting for a tweak for it, notwithstanding that fact that it appears when you are typing a fresh address.
I miss my Mouse Gestures addon a lot, since I would close a tab just by moving the mouse to the right keeping my right click depressed, so I hope the makers update their wonderful extension.

In Firefox 3 all the tabs look very similar; identifying which one you are on is slightly difficult than before, it is the one in bold. I wonder why they changed this one.

I don’t use the awesome bar as much becuase I use the mouse to locate the bookmarks rather than type in the address(since I use a laptop and external mouse), I might deactivate it.

There are not many themes to choose from; someone has got to make a theme resembling the FF2 look(atleast for my sake).

One useful feature is that on deleting a bookmark from the drop-down list, either from the menu bar or the bookmark toolbar, the entire list does not disappear, so you can delete another if you still want to.

I’ve gone through a series of crashes already, including one while writing this post, some within 4 minutes of each other, which maybe due to the incompatible plugins and extensions. On that note, the crash-reporter is very much improved with a better interface.

The Firefox and Mozilla homepages have undergone a ‘hippy’ transformation, to make it look more friendly to the increased audience. The previous style had a ’strong’ and classic feel to it, just like the default look of Firefox 2.

I have the 2.0.0.14 setup….. dilly-dallying whether to revert back.

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June 19, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

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