I decided to try Firefox 3 today, because Firefox 2 takes well over five seconds to load on my new Eee system. Not a big deal most of the time, but when I’m scanning RSS news articles in Thunderbird and keep seeing articles I want to read, a five second delay for each one gets old pretty quickly.
My only concern was that some of my extensions probably wouldn’t work with it. I don’t use that many, but over the years I’ve collected ten that I keep active most of the time. Of those, NoScript and Secure Login are the only ones that I won’t live without. To make a long story short, it turns out that five of my extensions are already set up to work with it, including those two, so that’s not a problem.
As was promised, it’s faster loading — about 20% faster initially (less than four seconds on the Eee), and near-instantaneous when starting later instances while the original one is still active. But there are a lot of other nice little features that I’ve discovered in it. The full-screen mode has a larger usable area. It’s much more readable when you shrink the text — I can reduce it quite a bit and still read it easily. The security warnings are much more noticeable, and can be turned off on a per-site basis (like the ZFS-FUSE bug-reporting page, it doesn’t recognize the certificate issuer at present), and there are several other minor changes that I don’t presently recall (as well as the Easter egg in it).
All in all, I like it. 🙂
Plus Firefox 3.0 has that native appearance and engine, which makes it look nice on a Mac and like part of the desktop’s theme in Linux. (As far as I can tell about the same in Windows, ‘cept the bigger back-button, and it probably draws faster or something.)
The only drawback is that occasionally it hangs, but it doesn’t happen often, and of course, since this ain’t Windows, it doesn’t take down anything but itself until I force-quit it when it does. I could always run FF2 if that becomes a problem, it’s only happened twice.
I didn’t notice any “nativity” problems with Firefox 2 myself, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to that sort of thing. And I haven’t seen a hang yet either — but Firefox 2 hangs whenever I watch something from YouTube and then try to close the tab. Haven’t tried that with FF3 yet, it might have the same problem.
It’s happened a third time, but for some reason it happened in other OSs too, so I guess I make browsers do things they shouldn’t do. 😉