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June 16, 2008

Firefox 3 arrives at 1 p.m. Tuesday: Awesome or not?

I mentioned last month that the "pledge to download Firefox 3" campaign strikes me as silly. Even if their marketing geniuses have decided to try to set a record for most downloads in 24 hours tomorrow when Firefox 3 is released (beginning at 1 p.m EDT), what does pledging have to do with it?

"Remind me" would have been enough.

So while you're reading A Field Guide to Firefox 3 to get up to speed on what's coming, you might also want to view a skeptic's take: What have I got against Firefox 3? is a catalogue of blogger and tester Peng's disappointment with some of the "improvements":

It’s a known issue that I’m not thrilled with Firefox 3. There are some nice improvements to it, but after seeing the progress of development through the betas and seeing where Firefox 3 was headed I decided it had been time to try out other browsers. Unfortunately I’m so spoiled by Firefox’s extensions that no other browser could make me happy. But I thought with Firefox 3 in the third (and probably last) release candidate I would sit down and try to express exactly what it is about Firefox 3 that makes me wish I could be working with Firefox 2.5 rather than Firefox 3...

He's not alone in his objections -- there's a new and highly touted extension, for instance, that lets you skip the new "awesome bar" pictured below (officially, the Smart Location Bar), which mixes your bookmarks and browser history as you type. You can revert to the look of the Firefox 2 location bar with the "oldbar" extension.

As one oldbar user wrote,

Oh boy! I thought that I need to uninstall the new FF, as I was annoyed by that "smart" suggestion on the searching bar. Now, me happy!! Yuppyyy! Nice version of FF and that's because it reacts three times faster! I think that was the only thing that was missing from this browser. Only to be faster. I had to look for the tips that will put the close button on every tab and still looking for the classic appearance. Again, I think the old FF was excellent and the only change was needed in fast reaction.

I think that's all I want, too -- and better memory handling so I can zip around the 85 tabs I usually have open without crashing -- but I'm open to test-driving it all before I strip it down.

If you're a true believer who wants to be fully part of the FF3 hoopla, Air Mozilla, the Internet multimedia presence of Mozilla, will be covering the release as though it were a space-shuttle launch.

Links:
Mozilla.com, ground zero for FF3 downloads Tuesday
Firefox extensions

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 1:28 AM | Permalink