| First Impressions of Firefox 3 |
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| Written by Brent Martin | |||||
| Wednesday, 18 June 2008 | |||||
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Firefox 3.0 was released yesterday and I downloaded it along with 6M+ of my closest friends. I’ve been using it for almost 24 hours now and I thought I’d let you know my first impressions. The installation process was almost too easy. I could have sworn I chose the "Custom" install, but it never asked me "custom-type" questions, it just installed it in the directory I specified. The first thing I noticed when I fired it up was that most of my extensions were not compatible with 3.0, other than Flashgot and Live HTTP Manager. The only one that I really miss is my del.icio.us plugin, but I think there’s probably a bookmarklet workaround I need to investigate. Speaking of bookmarklets, all of my existing PeopleSoft navigation bookmarklets are all still working. No problems there. So I’m still able go to a location within any environment, and go to the same page w/ same key values in a different environments – a major timesaver. It remembered all of my saved passwords, so I was back to using my favorite sites totally oblivious to what my passwords were immediately. In Firefox version 2.0, whenever I’d click a link in MS Outlook or Word it would eventually take me there but it would also throw an error about the URL Failed. This doesn’t happen anymore with version 3.0. Within PeopleSoft, everything still seems to work just fine, and it may have been my imagination but page loads seemed a bit snappier. Alternating colors in grids are more difficult to distinguish – this was very visible on the process monitor page. One thing I like is that read-only fields show up a lot better in 3.0 than they did in 2.0. But on the down-side, the updatable fields have a “read-only” look until you mouse over them or give them focus. I’m sure after a week or so I won’t notice this though. The CTRL-J still has the problem where you have to hit it twice and it brings up the download manger. Shift-Ctrl-J works the first time, but it also brings up the java error console. I can’t remember if version 2.0 did the same thing. The memory footprint seems to be a little smaller. I’ve been running Firefox for about 5 hours since my last reboot, and it’s grown to almost 80MB in memory. That’s still big, but I’ve seen version 2.0 grow to over 128MB, so it seems like an improvement. Unfortunately there was one fly in the ointment. I was simply reading a web page using the clickwheel of my mouse to scroll down when it came up with an error that said “We’re sorry. Firefox had a problem and crashed. We’ll try to restore your tabs and windows when Firefox restarts.” I restarted, and it did a great job of restoring my tabs. The crash hasn’t repeated. Overall I’d give Firefox 3.0 my stamp of approval. Let me know what you think.
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