Daniel Marino

Trying Out Firefox 3 Beta 4

I was holding out on trying Firefox 3 for a while, but could not resist when I heard how much less memory it uses and how it claims as being twice as fast, especially with sites using a lot of Javascript. What is my initital thought? It is way faster than I thought it would be. For instance my NetVibes page loads probably three or four times faster than it did with Firefox 2. And since I always have five or more programs open at any given time (including memory hogs like Photoshop or Illustrator) its nice to know that Firefox won’t be using all of my RAM.

Drawbacks

Unfortunately, the Beta version does not come without drawbacks, and so far (I’ve been using Firefox 3 for about 15 minutes now) my biggest complaint is that none of my extensions from Firefox 2 work. That includes the ever-popular Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar — two extensions that I use several times daily.

Other Items to Note

Some other things I noticed, for better or worse, are that form-related tags are styled almost identically as Safari’s — which I don’t necessarily care for. When an input field has focus, Firefox 3 adds an annoying blue highlight around the field. There might be a way to turn that off using CSS, but if there is, I don’t know about it (I haven’t exactly looked for a solution…). At the same time though, radio buttons now look full and robust where as with previous versions of Firefox, they looked puny and pixelated.

What to Do?

So I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to go back to version 2 or stick it out with 3. Speed is a big factor for me where I’m online the majority of the day, and I’m not going to lie—I like to surf it up during downtime at work. However, as I already mentioned, there are some extensions that are dire to me and I can’t imagining living without them. Those are the only factors affecting my decision.

As I conclude this entry, I think I’m going to try and stick it out the rest of the week with Firefox 3 and see how desperately I miss my extensions. I really am thrilled with the increase in website load times and how it uses less memory to run. I’ll be sure to let you know if I switch back. Happy Surfing!