[Gllug] Firefox 3

[Marcus Taylor]

Peter Childs wrote:
> What is people's opion of the New Firefox 3 I think its currently out in
> release candidate.

I have been using it with ubuntu 7.10 on a mac mini [512MB] and I and 
very impressed - for me it is a lot snappier and memory usage is about 
half. I very often have 10+ tabs open - about 15 extensions [you should 
check all the ones you want are compatible] loaded and it now can handle 
this nicely - before it would crawl along - usually until flash made it 
freeze - now flash ['official'] seems a lot more stable also. [I can 
refresh a youtube page now!]

The main 'problems' I encountered were usability - after using something 
daily for a few months it is hard to have change 'forced' upon you.

> My Users say its slow and the new drop down location list is too large and
> does not show them what they expect.

I hated the new drop down box - now I use it efficiently I probably be 
lost without it. It is very handy to revisit pages if you remember the 
filename/title [the more unique the better]. I can see some users not 
using it like that and still type in the whole address - I think an 
extension exists or you can configure to go back to the old style.

> The Web seams to say its faster, But from what I've heard from real people
> this is not true (mind you speed is more of a feeling than a reality)

Agreed - the default install with no extensions flew along - I did 
notice slow downs obviously when I began adding extentions - but no 
where near as bad as ff2...

> I've heard some people here suggesting it......
> 
> I guess the problem with Web Browsers now is that they are a finished
> project and anything that will not work on Firefox 1 or IE4 is probably not
> work viewing anyway. (Mind you some of the Tweeks are good, but thats all
> they are tweeks)

I feel the development has gone in the right direction - stability and 
speed seem to have been prioritized more [I crawled through endless bug 
reports / bug wars on bugzilla for FF2] and this shows

How I feel firefox really improves over other browsers now is a lot of 
work has gone into usability - When FF1/IE4 came out I imagine [pulls 
figure out of the air] I visited 80% less websites than I do now and I 
had nowhere near as many username/passwords/blogs/addresses/feeds etc to 
remember - and the mozilla team seem to have worked on organising my 
browser so I can be more efficient with all this information.

I can also see me converting to FLocK at some point ;)

-- 
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|     Marcus Taylor     |                            Tel: 0207 7398704 |
+-----------------------+                 Email: marcus at fatbeehive.com |
| Systems Administrator |               Web: http://www.fatbeehive.com |
|    Fat Beehive Ltd    | 2nd Floor, 59 Rivington St, London, EC2a 3QQ | 

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