Firefox 3 Experience
Firefox has been my main browser for a long time. I really loved Firefox 2 and the waves of add-ons that were created by the community. This added tremendous value to the browser and put it on pair with Opera. You’d always find an add-on for something that you needed or did not like and it was easy to create a browser that was more or less designed and providing the functionality that you wanted.
Controversy started with the release of Firefox 3 which mainly concentrated on a new feature called the Awesome Bar which was simply a change in the way the location bar worked. I do not want to get into that deeply here but if you are interested you can follow the Firefox 3 location bar discussion at Ghacks.
I did not mind it that much because I mainly use a bookmarks toolbar to access the sites that I visit regularly and since I have disabled the history it never was a problem for me.
My initial experience with Firefox 3 was not that positive. I experienced a huge cpu load and memory usage every 45-60 minutes in which Firefox 3 would become totally unresponsive. I first thought that it was caused by the Brief add-on which was the RSS Feed reader add-on that I had been using for a while but it turned out to be something else.
The culprit were Firefox Live Bookmarks which update themselves automatically. Whenever they did that my browser would freeze. Not a nice feeling if you are in the middle of writing an article or doing other time sensitive things. After exporting the live bookmarks, importing them into Google Reader and deleting them in Firefox 3 the high loads stopped.
That was a relief but it cost me half a day to discover why it was caused in first place. I also had some difficulties with add-ons that were not compatible to Firefox 3 and that would not even work if I would force compatibility.
I really like Firefox 3 now. It’s faster, more responsive and uses less system resources which is always great.
Now, what about you ? Care to tell me if you made the switch to Firefox 3 yet and how your experience was ?
Joe Vautour said...
I became a huge fan of Firefox right around when Firefox 2 came out. I agree that it is the best browser because of the customization possibilities that are available through add-ons and other tweaks. Shortly after upgrading to Firefox 3 Firefox was crashing quite a bit on me. I was concerned but not about to abandon my beloved browser. Here is an article that I found that came to my rescue. http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/internet/firefox/troubleshooting-problems-with-firefox-3-crashing-or-hanging/
I disabled all my add-ons and plug-ins. Then started to enable them one at a time in order of importance to me. This has had a huge impact on my crashes. I haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly where the problem is yet but at least I can use it without worrying that it will crash every ten minutes.