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How can people not use Firefox 3?

4 points by globalrev ↗ HN
This maybe isn't suited to Hacker News but is there anyone on this forum that don't use Firefox 3?

I just switched from Firefox 2 and having both Safari and IE installe don my computer and while I thought Firefox 2 was really good it wasnt superior but Firefox 3 is just awesome.

The smartbar is awesome, Im having an evergrowing list of bookmarks but Firefox 3 handles that so nicely by suggesting and saving from previously visited sites.

IE is unsafe and slow, Safari doesn't handle everything and is ugly. Firefox 3 is very fast, much faster than the previous and can handle much more tabs and windows, very welcome. It is very customizable (well entirely you could say considering it is open source but I mean for average Joe it is still fairly easy to change basic stuff). Well done, all features are welcome, none are annoying.

A good example of how good open source can be!

11 comments

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jncraton
The latest version of Opera continues to outperform Firefox 3 in terms of speed. IE7 is ugly and bloated, but it isn't terribly insecure or buggy. On Mac, Camino is a good alternative to Firefox given that it uses the same rendering engine but it uses native Cocoa APIs. I personally use Firefox 3 most of the time, but I also use Opera and IE7 for occasional browsing and testing.
jamess
I installed a firefox 3 beta some time ago and hated it. I'm still using firefox 2, though I guess at some point soon they're probably going to abandon the branch and push firefox 3 on me via automatic updates. I'm not terribly looking forward to it.
run4yourlives
I'm actually not that happy with my FF3 experience so far. (FF is my primary browser)

They've changed something with how the browser loads pages, and I find if I'm loading a particularly unresponsive page, it hangs and I have no access to the stop button. It' really quite annoying.

It seems to crash randomly without any input from me. Previously, FF would crash sometimes if I opened too many tabs at once, now, FF crashes while I'm moving my mouse.

The behavior of the bookmarks menu to me is completely counter intuitive and very annoying. You basically can't access your bookmarks without automatically creating a new one for the current page. That's wacko.

I'm still not happy that it's such a resource hog either. It's the number one memory user on my pc right now... outpacing IDE's, email clients and MS office. It's a fricken browser!

This could just be my experience, and FF is still my goto browser, but overall I'm not that impressed with the direction Mozilla is going. I'd love it if they licked the RAM issues and just kept things as simple as possible. I don't need the "feature creep".

crzivn
Opera! I have 6 windows open with a total of maybe 200 tabs (yes, I have a problem). I think firefox would struggle in such cases. Not sure though. Also, I'm making rationalizations for my emotional choice of browser. So there.
makecheck
Well at least for me:

At work, Firefox 3 won't even start under Window Maker...still trying to figure out what's going on. So I'm stuck with Firefox 2.

And I don't use it on my Mac at home, because OmniWeb 5 is better in my opinion.

SwellJoe
I use it on my desktop, but I've decided not to upgrade from Firefox 2 on my lappy until 3 stabilizes some. It crashes about every 20-45 minutes of usage, which is deeply irritating. I'll probably revert to Firefox 2 on my desktop, as well. I like the new stuff in Firebug, but it's not worth the instability.

I'm running the latest Opera on my XO, and find it much improved over older versions--screen real estate is finally being respected in Opera (it used to be really cramped, but has gotten more minimal). Speed is good, stability is good, and memory usage is good. If I can get the hang of the JavaScript debugger in Opera, I might even switch on my laptop and desktop. I never thought I'd consider Opera a better browser than Firefox...but with the poor stability and bloat of FF3, I'm finding myself not really loving Firefox, anymore. Hopefully, it'll get better with the next release.

hopeless
The Awesome bar is actually pretty good but it takes some getting used to. The bookmarks menu is weird and just plain stupid. And frankly, it crashes more often than any piece of software I've owned in the last 5 years. I'm almost willing to bet Win98 was more stable.

Still, I'm sticking with it in the hope that Mozilla will push out a patched/stable version soon

aggieben
It's easy, friend. Two reasons:

a) most people simply don't care. period. IE6 (or whatever the OS opens when they double-click "internet") will let them read news or check email. b) Their Large Corporation, Inc., has a policy against open source, and they don't have admin privileges anyway.

gruseom
I've been sticking with 2 as a way of forcing myself to be careful about writing performant code. That way the app I'm writing has a better chance of being fast in the next generation of browsers. This is important. I could of course just use 2 for testing, but I find that doesn't have quite the same psychological effect.