The Interactive Dishwasher

Firefox 3.0 – first impressions

With the failure of the download site for the much ballyhooed Firefox 3.0 on release day, I waited until the next afternoon when I was able to download it very quickly. I unpacked it into my home directory and ran it with './firefox/firefox &'.

The window opened with the tabs I had open in my last session. Then things began to go downhill.

Next and Previous page buttons?

The first thing I noticed was that my next page and previous page buttons had disappeard from the toolbar. No problem, I thought; I'll just put them back. I opened the toolbar customization window, but they were not there. Where have they gone, and more importantly, why have they gone?

There are still 'back' and 'forward' selections in the pop-up menu with mouse button 3, but they don't have any mechanism for showing a list of pages in either direction. They are not as useful as the old buttons.

And when I revert to FF 2.0.0.14, they are now gone and unavailable. It's a good thing I do a daily back-up of the .mozilla directory and can revert to the earlier configuration.

After receiving some help on the alt.html newsgroup, I discovered that the button is available, somewhat changed, and I now have it on my toolbar. (FF3 had moved it from my normal location and on to a toolbar that I don't use and was not visible.)

Location bar history

The drop-down history list on the location bar used to be a long scrollable list. Now it is a fixed number of items: 12. That's far too few.

Bookmarks

First, the bookmarks menu.

In older versions of Firefox, I was annoyed that I couldn't remove the 'Bookmarks Toolbar' entry from the menu. Now, there are two additional items, 'Recent tags' and 'Recently Bookmarked' that cannot be removed.

These additional sub-menus increase the length so that scrolling is required to get to all the items. I want the menu for what I want, not for what Mozilla thinks I should have.

OK, the 'Recently Bookmarked' sub-menu somewhat mitigates the problem, but I would much prefer to have everything on screen, and create my own sub menus to categorize them.

Setting a bookmark

After pressing Ctrl-D, the window that opens up is neither movable nor resizable. I cannot move it to a more convenient location, nor enlarge it to a more usable size.

Conclusion

There are, no doubt, many improvements, but from the moment I loaded Firefox 3.0, all I have found are things that are done worse than before or are missing altogether. I hope that I find some improvements before I give up on it and go back to 2.0.0.14.