Firefox 3.0: First Impressions

They say first impressions are often the truest. If that is the case, the new release of Firefox (version 3.0) is going to last with me for a while.

If you don't know already, I am a huge Firefox fan. I divorced IE way back in early 2006. I played around with Firefox until 1.5 came out and I transferred over. I only use IE when needed- all of it at work. Some of the things that lured me away from IE was the tabbed browsing and extensions. IE did this years ago before they started adding all that fat into the core app. Firefox was a breath of fresh air. Small footprint, fast, and customizable. I loved the idea of adding nifty tools that I needed or wanted to play around with.

So, I installed Firefox 3.0 last night. As with every major release of FF, the various extensions, or add-ons as they call them now, may stop working with the newer version. So I decided to upgrade my version of FF on my home Mac. Currently I am using a Mac-mini, exclusively for about 8 months now, since my home PC decided to cook my motherboard. Since then, I have become a full-fledged Mac-Fanboy. I'll write a separate post on my switch over to the Mac and what I love about them and why I am turning my back on Windows. In the meantime, check out David Allison's blog on his conversion to Mac from Windows and his new found love for the fruity machine- good stuff.

Anyway, back to FF. I decided to test out FF on my home PC where I don't need all my bells and whistles for browsing at home. After installing it on the Mac-mini (a cinch) I was greeted with 2 things. A complete GUI overhaul that looks a lot like Apple's Safari and the dreaded, "These add-ons are not compatible screen". Now, in the past I have ventured into the beta for FF early on but in this go round, I decided to not mess around with all that fun. Two reasons for that- 1: I did not have the time to play around with it; 2: I didn't want to loose my core extensions. I'll break down my Firefox 3 impressions in a couple of sections below:

Interface
After updating FF, I was greeted to a Safari-esk GUI. I'm a big fan of the Safari skin, so this was a pleasant surprise. Firefox calls this Platform-Native Look & Feel. Depending on what OS you install FF 3 on, the default GUI will resemble the OS look and feel. So in my case, it looks a lot like Safari- which is not bad. I am hoping that I can choose this skin in my Windows environment when I switch over. I like the simplicity and clean look of the default GUI now. I hated the original one. It looked too beta if you would for me. I used the Noia 2.0 Extreme theme pre 3.0 and it was a good one. I like the rounder edges to all the input fields and the colorful icons. The beauty of Firefox is you can personalize the skin with whatever you like. other than that, everything else seems to "look" the same so far.

The Awesome Bar. Yes, that is what Firefox's video calls the new address bar. It has a variety of features and they aren't too shabby. They now have a much better history management tool called the library accessible straight from the address bar. You can browse your history from there, bookmark sites with a single or double click, and tag sites for easier access.

Better Download Manager. Now with the ability to pause and resume downloads, even after crashes. You also have the ability to search your downloads right from the dialogue box- nifty.

Add-ons Manager. This area has been revamped totally. With hot buttons running along the top for new add-ons, existing extensions, themes and plugins- the interface feels more intuitive and is much better laid out. Firefox will display new Add-ons available to you with ratings and descriptions, some of which are pretty deep, right from the Add-ons screen. They even let you search for new Add-ons right from that interface. No more sending you to the web page for extensions. This area looks great and is a huge improvement over the old iteration.

Some Other Features:

Full Zoom
Instant Website ID
Tab scrolling and quickmenu
Save Tabs
Support for Widgets and Growl in OSX


Extensions
Ah yes, the extensions. I am not going to go crazy here- there are already a ton of extensions available for FF 3. I am going to talk about the extensions I had, which do not work now or that I had to replace. I have a set of must have extensions for FF posted to the left of my blog for anyone interested. This list was prior to 3.0, but I have since added the 3.0 replacements- if any. In short, if you have extensions that you really can't live without, make sure they are available before upgrading or check for any alternatives.

I replaced the following extensions:

Google Browser Sync with Foxmarks
note: Google, it seems, has stopped any and all development on Google Browser Sync. They are not upgrading it for FF 3 and will not support it after 2008- sigh, I really like that extension. There is no other so far with all of its features currently available. Mozilla has something called Weave, but they are no longer accepting registration at the moment.

Super DragandGo with QuickDrag

Could not replace:
Add Bookmark Here- still testing FF's bookmarking to see if it will be a good enough replacement.

Performance
I've only been using FF now for about 2 days, but I am very happy with the overall speed. It opens pages much quicker and feels more responsive. I don't have any benchmark data to go by right now, but I can really tell the difference. I did however jump through some websites that have a lot going on like Disney, Nickelodeon, PlayStation, and NBC and all of them loaded pretty quick. I'll probably need more time with it to get a better feel of the overall performance, and with less memory being used, I definitely think that performance is much better.

Summary
So what does all this mean? If you haven't guessed- go out and get it. If you haven't tried Firefox at all, this is the perfect opportunity to jump in. With a very well tuned and polished user interface, this version of Firefox leaves IE in the dust. For those Firefox loyalists, if you haven't taken the leap, it is safe on the other side. Give it a try- no nasty surprises. I would only remind you of the possibility of some of your favorite extensions not being supported. Other than that- all seems well in the land of Mozilla. They really addressed many issues in this release and I think that Firefox can restart its share-munching of the browser market.

Firefox is back in form.

l8r