Adventures with Firefox 3

I really love the Firefox browser. I have been using it since the 0.x releases. Stable, intuitive, feature rich and not from Micro$oft.

About a year ago after Internet Explorer had seized up for the umpteenth time, I decided to use Firefox as my primary browser. Thanks to the developers of IE Tabs, a nifty add-on that brings up an Internet Explorer tab within Firefox,  I was even able to stay within Firefox and go to certain  specialized sites that need IE5 or more to operate properly.

Firefox 2.x was a great release and did anything I asked of a browser. It never, EVER crashed.

Not so with Firefox 3. I downloaded Firefox 3 and installed it. With the exception of a few obscure add-ons, all went well.

My first impressions were mixed. This whole deal about the “Awesome Bar” seemed a little over hyped to me. I rarely actually type in a URL address. Either I am getting there from a search or it is from a bookmark. After watching the cute little video on the Firefox site, I tried using this feature. Yawn. It’s nice, but hardly “awesome”.

The advanced bookmarking features were nice, but I had long ago gone over to del.icio.us for my bookmarks and never used the built-in bookmarks functions. Well, I thought I would try to integrate the two in my daily use. Since the bookmarks do “respect” del.icio.us, it has worked with mixed results.

But the thing that has me more than disconcerted is the fact the Firefox 3 has crashed completely a number of times. The first few times, I got the Firefox error reporting dialog box. Now it is just CLUNK, POOF and it is gone!

I will be the first to admit that I am running quite a few add-ons, but they are all “official” add-ons from the Mozilla.org site. I suppose I should try to disable them all and turn them on one at a time to see if stability improves.

I guess I’ll have to mosey over to the support forums for Firefox 3 and see what is going on. Something I have never had the need to do after using the application for what, five years?

Sigh.