cellio: (avatar)
Monica ([personal profile] cellio) wrote2008-06-18 11:26 am
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Firefox 3.0: the first 15 minutes

With some trepidation (I'm never sure which upgraders are recoverable if they turn out to be bad ideas), I installed Firefox 3.0 at work. I haven't really put it through its paces yet, but so far it seems to be less of a resource hog, and it seems to build in some features that previously required add-ons (accessibility stuff, better tab/session management, etc).

One problem: the new "smart locater bar" is bloated out the wazoo. I'm used to being able to see the last dozen URLs I typed in by hand; now they've cluttered that up. Fortunately, on day one of the release someone has already published the OldBar extension to fix it. I love open interfaces and large user communities. Hey, it's already up to version 1.2. :-)

I haven't figured out how to disable the star icon that, on single click, bookmarks the current page. I prefer to be a little more intentional about my bookmarking, and that icon is too close to other things I want to click on.

I expected that some add-ons might not be compatable with the new version; that always happens. IE Tab and the PDF viewer were fixed while I was typing this. But Firefox 3 is also picky now; Convo is compatable but Firefox won't install it because it does not provide for secure updates. Bah -- let that be my decision, Mozilla, not yours. Ask me; don't lock me out. I won't be upgrading my home machine or laptop until this is addressed.

The buttons in the toolbar are, um, "special". I haven't yet figured out how to change them to something that's easier to see. The gray treatment might be trendy and all, but it doesn't work in a reverse-video environment, and I expect to see something in every button slot even if that button is not currently available/meaningful. Right now I've got a big expanse of black where my "stop" button should be. That works because I know that's the "stop" slot, but I shouldn't have to know that. I sure don't know all the various things that show up along the bottom of the frame, for instance.

Amazon's site has some problems in 3.0 -- the search dialogue isn't doing the right things with colors. Typing light text in a box with a white background is no good. This worked yesterday in Firefox 2; I didn't check right before upgrading, so I can't say for sure that it's not Amazon's bug, but I don't think so. (Hmm... on the other hand, I can't find my wish list on the main page either now, and that's probably not Firefox's doing. I was going there at all to test a library-lookup plugin; that'll have to wait.)

That's the quick look.

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[identity profile] cahwyguy.livejournal.com 2008-06-18 03:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Hmmm. I use Seamonkey (the bundled package of Firefox and Thunderbird)... I wonder when they'll port the Firefox 3 engine over.

[identity profile] alfiechat.livejournal.com 2008-06-18 03:35 pm (UTC)(link)
do you mind if i share this post with dave, he seems interested in the details?
cellio: (avatar)

[personal profile] cellio 2008-06-18 11:09 pm (UTC)(link)
It's a public entry; no need to ask.

[identity profile] multislackerkim.livejournal.com 2008-06-20 11:36 am (UTC)(link)
After a quick check of Amazon in Safari, the "Your Lists" icon is still next to the cart on the far right of the menu bar.
cellio: (avatar)

[personal profile] cellio 2008-06-20 01:27 pm (UTC)(link)
On the machine I upgraded to FF 3, both the shopping-cart and wish-list icons are missing. They're clickable if I hover the mouse in that expanse of apparent background, but the images are gone and there's no alt text. It's very weird. (AdBlock doesn't work in FF3, by the way, not that I've ever blocked something on Amazon, so I don't see how it could be that. Oh, yeah, I guess I should have mentioned that AdBlock doesn't work; that's a pretty big hole. Though I assume it'll be fixed RSN.)

I've had bad experiences with the part of Amazon that deals with web-site issues, so I haven't asked them for debugging help this time. I mean, if they blew me off in response to "your site has been taking more than a minute per page to load for a week", why would I expect a better response now? (I was pretty surprised and disappointed when that happened.) Yeah, it's probably due to some unfortunate combination of add-ons and browser features interacting with some quirk of their site design; other sites work fine in FF 3 and Amazon works fine in IE. I still think they ought to care about the lost business.
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