Daniel told everyone yesterday why he would wait another month or so before he would make the switch from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 and I thought I share my Firefox 3 switching experience with everyone. I downloaded Firefox 3 on download day and installed it directly on my system. Bookmarks and RSS Feeds were imported just fine which was one of my major concerns because frankly, everything else could be easily changed again. Talking about options, layouts and stuff like that.
Some of my add-ons were not working in Firefox 3 and I tried to force compatibility on them which somehow did work. One of them however, Snap Links, was causing strange right-click side effects that made it more or less unusable at that time and the author has not created a compatible version yet.
The second add-on that caused problems, or so I thought, was Brief. Brief is a Firefox RSS Reader that uses the Live Bookmarks to display feeds from websites that users are subscribed to. Feeds were displaying find but cpu usage was somehow jumping up to 100% every 45-60 minutes. I thought it was Brief, discovered that it was not and finally found out that it was caused by the Live Bookmarks. I’m not sure what it happening but after exporting them and importing them into Google Reader and deleting them the cpu spikes stopped.
Must be some kind of auto updating or database optimization thingy that is causing that. It’s terrible. After that though everything worked smoothly and fine. I really do not care that much about the new location bar but discovered some nice features that had been added in Firefox 3 that I had to use an add-on for in Firefox 2. One that comes to my mind is the search for passwords form in the Password Manager.
Firefox 3 is nice, it’s a good browser. Not perfect and I can fully understand everyone who wants to wait for an update or two before he is making the switch. There is not really a key feature, a must have, that forces everyone to upgrade immediately. I was never an extension junkie, only have about six installed in my main profile that I cannot live without and only one did not work.
On the other hand I was never someone who forced himself to use one browser only. I would not have a huge problem switching to Opera, Internet Explorer or any other browser that would come out if Firefox 3 would have been a failure.
Tags: firefox, firefox 3, firefox 3 experience, mozilla
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