Why I’ve Already Uninstalled Firefox 3
I was looking forward to the release of Firefox 3. Though I hadn’t downloaded any of the betas or release-candidates, I was confident in the team, and pretty sure that it would be a seamless transition from 2.0.0.14 to 3.0.
As covered elsewhere in the blogosphere, it was initially difficult to download, as all of the servers were getting slammed simultaneously, as the entire internet was waiting for 10:00 AM Pacific to hit Captain Feathersword’s magic [download] button.
I finally managed to connect around 1:30 after a conference call wrapped up. Installation was indeed seamless, but I wasn’t so wild about some of the features I initially encountered. I had already “starred” the Lifehacker article for Firefox power users, so I referred to that and made some adjustments. A few of my plugins weren’t compatible, but they were nothing that I use regularly. After using FF3 for a few minutes, I got a popup to check for Add-On updates (I should have done that in the first place), and most of my non-conforming plugins were updated.
Things started to get dicey about a half-hour later, when checking my Gmail account led to the browser suddenly closing all on it’s own, followed by a nifty “Mozilla Crash” alert, and options for sending the notification to Mozilla. Then it started going downhill from there.
My heavily-used web apps - namely Gmail and Google Reader, kept crashing. I would get the message to either restore the session or start fresh, and usually Crash alerts would come up again unless I started fresh.
I had been interested in trying out the new Feedly application in Firefox, but I wanted to view their guided tour video, which was Quicktime. FF3 was not able to play the video - never getting past the :26 second mark. I was able to play it on another machine with the same QT and FF2.x, so I’m blaming FF3 on that one.
Just tonight, there was a CrunchGear post regarding a newly-found (obviously) security vulnerability in FF3, and that was the proverbial last straw. [Update: Though now it's reported that it also affects FF2.x, so you can remove one straw from the camel's back]. Not that I’m worried about security so much, but I think the whole FF3 release is a bit half-baked. I’m not upset, nor disappointed, but that may teach me to be one of the 8.2 million lemmings trying to set a “download record”.
Sure, it might be a smaller footprint in system resources. Sure, FF2 is prone to freezing on occasion. Sure, I have to turn in my “early adopter” cape and boots, but consider this:
- I received 14 “Mozilla Crash” alerts in 24 hour
- I experienced 19 instances of the browser just up and closing on it’s own. I’m on a Thinkpad T-60 with XP Pro, so it’s not like I’m using anything exotic.
- It killed Google Reader, even with disabling all plugins.
- It killed Google Mail (though less frequently)
- There’s no FireBug support (yet)
AND, I had to un-learn the simple act of typing in URLs.
I’m no dinosaur, but for someone that habitually types “http://www” as I have automatically from 12 years of experience, it’s disorienting to have the “Awesome Bar” pop up with every site I’ve visited - and be not even close to what I was going for. During the day job, we’ve been spec’ing out the auto-suggest feature in a “Find” portlet, and this type of behavior from the interface would fail a lot of usability labs. I was able to hack the about:config file down to two (the default is twelve), but it was still disorienting.
I left these comments on the FF3 Uninstall survey, and I am looking forward to a fast, stable incremental update around 3.0.0.3 or so, but for now I’m not believing (or at least participating in) the hype.
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