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	Replies: 23 - Pages: 2 [ Previous \| 1 2 ] - Last Post: Jun 26, 2008 10:14 PM Last Post By: Guest

Norm

Re: Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web
Posted: Jun 19, 2008 10:55 AM

in response to: Guest

I have used FF since 1.0. I typically have 3-6 open instances with 50-70 tabs. The only add-ons I use are Adblock and Noscript.

I tried FF3 for a couple days and ripped it out (its not trivial to downgrade) I run it on XP Pro SP2.

1. Despite all the hoopla FF3 used the same amount of memory as FF2, not that this really matters.

2. FF3 constantly consumes 20%-40% of the CPU when nothing is going on. FF2 displaying the exact same pages consumes 5%-15%.

3. The awesome bar sucks. My biggest problem is that it displays what you have been browsing to anyone looking over your shoulder. Lets imagine you have have been visiting a jobs site. You boss walks up and asks you to pull up something. You create a new tab and start typing "www". You get that far and FF3 displays a huge banner with hotjobs or whatever. What a stupid idea. Its even stupider that you cannot revert to the FF2 behavior. The suggested fixes (oldbar addon and various tweaks) don't really restore FF2 functionality.

4. FF3 sometimes takes minutes to start.

I'll be running FF2 until Mozilla fixes these problems. If they don't I will abandon FF.

oldphoneguy

Posts: 43
Registered: 02/01/08

Re: Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web
Posted: Jun 19, 2008 11:58 AM

in response to: Guest

"Guest" and your comment about the Special Olympics: shame on you!

lithops

Re: Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web
Posted: Jun 19, 2008 4:24 PM

in response to: Guest

After reading the excellent article and well meaning comments I will wait for a while and see if Mozilla comes out with modifications before changing to version 3. In addition during my wait people with more experienced than I will have worked out some configuration changes that will speed things up.

Chuck

Re: Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web
Posted: Jun 19, 2008 4:32 PM

in response to: Guest

I tried FF3 for a day and went back to FF2 the next. Still too many bugs, and I didn't like the new "look".

I'll check back in a couple of months to see if it's any better.

Keith

Re: Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web
Posted: Jun 20, 2008 12:06 PM

in response to: Guest

Personally, I think FF3 rocks, I'm not seeing any of behaviors (slow startup, excessive system usage) mentioned, and it is way faster than FF2.

Guest

Re: Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web
Posted: Jun 20, 2008 1:51 PM

in response to: Guest

I wish FF 2.0 had an extention to check if all my existing extensions of FF 2.0 were available in FF 3.0.

I did install FF3.0 and found that the extensions that I normally use with FF 2.0 are not compatible in 3.0.

FirefoxTester

Re: Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web
Posted: Jun 20, 2008 5:56 PM

in response to: Guest

Norm said:
"I tried FF3 for a couple days and ripped it out (its not trivial to downgrade) I run it on XP Pro SP2."

Here's a tip if you'd like to try FF3 without any pain should you want to go back to FF2. I have to test web apps across multiple builds of Firefox, and I've found you can setup side-by-side installs of multiple versions (this includes major versions as well as sub-versions) by simply making sure you install into different directories when you run the installer for each version. This trick applies to both Windows and Mac versions, and presumably might work for Linux builds as well.

This allows you to have multiple builds of Firefox co-existing on one machine. There are only a couple of caveats to this: 1) you can only run one version at a time and 2) when firing up a different version after running another, you may see temporary glitches in checking for extension upgrades, loading of the "Firefox has been upgraded" page, and some warning prompts that you may have suppressed may make a brief appearance. All these are merely cosmetic though... the browser will continue to work fine.

When you use a side-by-side install, all versions use the same user profiles, so be aware that a common setting used in one version will apply to all versions, but settings available specific to a version will not affect others.

With this method, I've managed to maintain 5 separate installs (1.0.7, 1.5, 2.0, 2.0.0.14, and 3.0) on the same XP box, as well as try various beta and RC builds which I could cleanly remove when I was done with them.

FF3 not up to FF2

Re: Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web
Posted: Jun 20, 2008 6:53 PM

in response to: Guest

Tried FF3 RC2 but did not like the looks or behavior.
Took a while but then found 2.0.14 or whatever, downloaded, uninstalled FF3 and installed FF2, it kept my bookmarks, everything,etc including the addons.
So I will stay with FF2.
FF3 is just to 'microsoft' like and if I wanted stuff I could not change, then I'd switch back to using IE from Micro$haft.

Guest

Re: Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web
Posted: Jun 26, 2008 10:14 PM

in response to: Guest

Things I liked in FF3:

1. Animation of tabs scrolling, when a new tab opens beyond the existing screen - previously it used to be a j-e-r-k shift to the new tab.
2. A bigger "back" button
3. removing the redundant Green arrow that was there besides the address bar.
4. "remember password" option does not block the screen, comes quietly in the top.
5. complete zoom in and zoom out of the page... awesome!! that was something I wanted for long..

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