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June 17, 2008

My quick review of Firefox 3 ()

by fluffy at 1:13 PM
After having used it for about 3 minutes:
  • It certainly feels a lot faster and more responsive, especially when loading old table-layout pages like PoE
  • Not sure if I like the Awesomebar yet. Maybe it'll grow on me.
  • Yay, my error animations run silky-smooth now!
  • Boo, the music on them doesn't loop right (maybe it's time to finally turn it into a Flash player instead of a Quicktime embed)
  • The new UI is weird but not incomprehensible. Although I miss the 'open' control on the download manager.

Comments

#10987 06/17/2008 07:23 pm
Except for the fact that there's not yet a way to disable the awful bar, I'm pretty happy with it. It definitely feels snappier than 2, and I'm glad they finally fixed the image title tooltip bug.
#10988 06/17/2008 07:31 pm
You can disable the awesomebar, with some settings hidden deep in about:config. I've seen posts which say how to disable it somewhere although I can't remember where.
#10989 06/17/2008 07:50 pm
fluffy:
You can disable the awesomebar, with some settings hidden deep in about:config. I've seen posts which say how to disable it somewhere although I can't remember where.


Ah, okay. Just needed to set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0.

They have a history of leaving some annoying setting on by default and only giving you the option to change it in about:config; I had the same complaint about the automatic large image resizing. Which still doesn't seem to be in the options menu.

To their credit, though, at least it actually resamples the images now.

Edit: actually, the resampling isn't really that good. Sigh.
#10990 06/17/2008 08:19 pm
Meanwhile, I went ahead and replaced the .wav files on the error pages with invisible Flash movies, which happen to also be higher-quality and smaller (since I could use mp3 instead of ADPCM since Flash isn't dumb about looping mp3s gaplessly). Woo.
#10991 06/17/2008 08:22 pm
mashuren:
I'm glad they finally fixed the image title tooltip bug.

Unfortunately, now it appears to have a ridiculously short timeout, so good luck reading the long tooltips.
#10992 06/17/2008 08:30 pm
Ooh, they also finally fixed the tab bar issue, where it'd keep the window open when you closed the last tab in the window. I'd actually gotten kind of used to that behavior (for a long time that was the only thing keeping me using Safari until I finally got sick of Safari's crappiness), but that's one thing I'll be glad to readjust to.
#10993 06/17/2008 08:37 pm
fluffy:
mashuren:
I'm glad they finally fixed the image title tooltip bug.

Unfortunately, now it appears to have a ridiculously short timeout, so good luck reading the long tooltips.


Ugh, you're right. And the people who maintained the long tooltip add-on probably aren't going to make a version for 3.0 because they figure the default behavior is good enough.

Kudos to them for making it faster, but boo for adding a bunch of superfluous bullshit while failing to really fix the few problems I had with 2.
#10994 06/17/2008 08:56 pm
BTW, the option you turned off only turns off the formatting for the awesomebar, not the search behavior. There's another option you have to set to go back to searching just URLs.
#11023 06/28/2008 12:01 am
Incidentally, I really like the awesomebar.