I, like millions of others downloaded Firefox 3 today. Lucky for Mozilla, I downloaded it twice at work because it won’t run on my work machine. The process starts and then dies silently and because it’s Windows, I really haven’t a clue why. At first I thought it might be a problem with the binary from some random mirror in Sweden so I refreshed until I got a Mozilla mirror instead — no dice.
I got home tonight and downloaded it again for the Windows machine and will be getting it again later for the Mac as well. Mozilla can thank me later for four downloads towards their silly and pointless World Record. It booted up fine on the XP laptop but there were two things I hated right off the bat. The first is that “feature” that slowed down my already pokey machine which is their “awesome bar”, “annoying bar”, “stupid fucking pointless bar”, whatever. There’s no need for this searching for a URL based on a few letters I have typed. I want it to behave like it used to: when I type in the start of a URL it should list ones I’ve entered myself before — not some other random site I’ve never seen before. So, I fired up about:config and typed in url in the filter. After fucking around with the options I finally came across browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped which is exactly what I wanted. The font in that part of the bar is still obnoxiously large but it’s working the way I want. I suggest everyone change it back to the way it should be.
The next thing that I couldn’t stand was the new theme. It seriously looks ridiculous. I remember when Firefox was meant to be a fast and clean alternative to IE. Now it’s starting to look like a molasses-based cartoon. Because I hated that new look and feel I searched around and found an unsupported fix. Check out this Firefox 2 theme for Firefox 3. It is “experimental” and requires a login but it works great. Thank fucking god.
Everything else seems to be working and contrary to all the press out on the web about FF3, I haven’t seen any speed improvements on my machine but hey, whatever. I just hope that horrid memory leak is fixed so I don’t have to lose sleep at night wondering if I left my browser window open all night long.
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June 18th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Bill,
I downloaded it too. I’m not quite as worked up about the “Awesome Bar” but I’m not sure that I like it either. It does seem to kind of just get in the way. I also deleted the “Most Visited” from the bookmark toolbar. If it’s a site that I visit all the time, then I probably have it bookmarked or in my reader. I haven’t seen any speed difference either.
Andy
June 18th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Andy,
I guess when you remember that Firefox was meant as a lean and mean replacement for IE and you watch it become a bloated and disgusting mess, you get worked up.
It took 21 seconds to boot on my laptop this morning. Firefox 2.0.0.14 took 6. Awesome.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:48 am
I’ve been running Firefox 3 nightlies for a while now, and now that I’m used to it, I really like the new toolbar. For me, the key was to realize that I didn’t need to be typing URLs there; often if I type a word related to the page, it finds it since it searches the titles of pages along with URLs. Also, I like its sorting algorithm; I’m at the point where for several sites I can type one or two letters and know for sure the result I want will be the first one. But, it does take some time to get used to.
For me, sites like Gmail run faster with Firefox 3, but in general I don’t see huge speedups in page loading. The real performance benefit is in fewer memory leaks (I think the Firefox 2 leaks were even worse on Mac than on Windows). Hope your leak got fixed :-)
June 18th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Manu,
It’s not so much that I don’t like the idea of the new URL bar, it’s just that on the laptop, which shouldn’t feel as slow as it does — perhaps I need to clean up that machine, it is a fucking dog to get going once I start keying in a URL.
As for the rest, I haven’t tried it on the Mac yet but I never saw much of a memory issue on my Mini. The laptop, however, would literally be at a standstill swapping out to disk for over 5 minutes before I could even get the process window to come up.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Yeah, I’m running on a MacBook Pro w/ 4 GB RAM so some of those performance issues go away :-). Is it faster when you set the matchOnlyTyped option? If it is, then that’s just some bad searching code.
June 19th, 2008 at 12:10 am
For a little of the other side’s perspective:
I love the Awesome Bar. It’s really fast on all of my machines, and it saves me a lot of time over the old version. I don’t remember exactly the beginning of the URL I want, so I often type some words in the middle, or maybe just some of the words from the title. The AwesomeBar only shows websites I’ve visited (and/or bookmarked), so it’s highly relevant, much better than having to use Google for searching when I already know what I want.
So the best thing to do is make it an option. I love that it’s enabled by default. It saves me lots of time every day (I’ve been using Fx3 since beta).
June 19th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Here’s a blog post from someone who had a similar perspective to you, Bill:
http://zpao.com/articles/4-its_awesome_for_a_reason
He doesn’t talk about performance, though.
June 19th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Lifehacker offers people on both sides of the fence some options about the “Not So Awesome Bar” here.