Firefox 3 Might be Mozilla's Windows Vista
OK, after a long wait, Mozilla's Firefox 3 is out. Firefox 2 became a disappointment for some people (incuding me) because of memory management and stability issues. A lot of hope was placed in...
So, now it's out and I am NOT upgrading my production desktops and notebooks (Windows and Mac) from 2 to 3. Here's why...
1. Firefox's increased security for SSL certs is a good thing. But, it is a pain to deal with in the same way that Windows Vista's UAC is. Yes, Yahoo! Mail's SSL URL does not match its certificate. The old way of notifying me and then letting me through with a single click was fine and relatively safe. The new requirement to add it to the safe list is safer but ultimately more annoying. People who work on multiple boxes will be especially annoyed.
2. I don't use many plugins. So, the few I do use are important to me and none of them work with 3. Forecastfox, Google Toolbar, McAfee SiteAdvisor, and Zoho Notebook Helper are all gone. I'm told turning off validate plug-ins might get some working. But, urmph...
3. Some websites appear unhappy or at least unprepared for Firefox 3. One of my favorite web services, EverNote notifies me of a possible problem. Clicking ok lets me use the site. But, still... urmph... The Google Docs spreadsheet poops out after 650 rows in a 700+ row spreadsheet. And, yes, I uninstalled Google Gears a few weeks ago because of its problems with large-ish spreadsheets. So, it is not the cause of the problem. Twitter.com actually crashed the browser three times in a row on a Windows Vista box. It started working after recovering from the third crash. But, that doesn't give me the warm and fuzzies.
So, annoying security settings, plug-in incompatibilities, and web 2.0 issues are enough for me to stick with Firefox 2.0.0.14 despite its own issues. I'll wait for a Firefox 3.x point release update before considering moving from 2 to 3. How about you?
Very interesting, indeed.
Very interesting, indeed. I've been running into issues for the last few days... and have only now started to look across the web for a common thread. As an ex-Windows user (because of Vista), I can only wince at the comparison. Here's what I've been seeing.
Firefox 3 crashes regularly on my wife's Ubuntu laptop. She's not started screaming... yet... so I'm hoping the point release comes out quickly.
Firefox 3 is more stable on my iMac... but I have an issue using a large Google Docs spreadsheet. It has (currently) around 800 rows. Everything loads quickly... but shortly after I scroll down to the bottom, a refresh begins... and before I know what happened... the spreadsheet is only displaying the first 200 rows. I opened the same google spreadsheet in Safari without any issues what so ever.
So.... Firefox... what happened? I've grown used to your breaking my favorite plugins.... but... I've never really had any other stability or usability issues. Did you hire the QA team from MS?
All this is twice as interesting now that Google has just announced the availability of their own (Firefox Killer?) browser, Chrome. If I could ditch MS after 20 years... I can likely ditch FF after a much shorter tenure.
Anthony
So basically item 1. is
So basically item 1. is mozilla's fault.... You can wait for a point release but all that is doing is giving websites and plugins time to catch up which they should have already done since there have been publicly available rc's of ff3 for a while. That whole evernote thing is they are filtering by user agents and fell asleep and forgot to test ff3 and change there filtering.....