Too bad Firefox 3 is open-source - if it wasn't I'd sue every motherfucker who had anything to do with it. If it isn't the Windows Vista of Firefox releases then I don't know what is. Check out the problems I've had running it for just under ten minutes...that's minutes - not hours, not days, not weeks - ten fucking minutes:
Serious Defects of Firefox 3
- It takes too long - at least 16 seconds - to start up.
- The Location Bar is impossible to type an URL into - if you have any pages from that domain bookmarked - first you have to erase the "most likely" page Firefox finds, then click "Go" to get to the page you want.
- 18 of my add-ons (<---and that's a perfect assload of add-ons, come on) are disabled in Firefox 3, including the massively popular AdBlockPlus and TabMixPlus; other popular missing ones are Linkification, Live PageRank, FullerScreen, LinkChecker, FEBE, and Paste 'n Go.
- Firefox 3's CSS rendering is so shitty that IE 7 is doing a better job now of rendering my other blog than Firefox 3 is. That may be a small nitpick but it infuriates me that people will think I have shitty CSS just because of Firefox's shitty rendering.
- The kicker is my Back and Forward buttons are missing - I mean missing - as in GONE. Here's a screen cap which shows the buttons are in fact MIA, like they were fucking stolen or something.
To my fellow haters, check it out...
Firefox 2 is installed on my D:\ drive, while Firefox 3 is installed on my C:\ drive - because I'm not stupid. I knew this browser wouldn't to live up to its hype so I made sure to do separate installs. To roll back all I have to do now is delete my Quick Launch shortcut...ha ha. The rest of you, unless you put as much thought into this sort of thing as I do, are completely screwed if you hate this new flavor of the world's best browser until yesterday as much as I do.
Not WORTH It
Granted, there are ways to force my missing add-ons to work in Firefox 3: I can use an about:config hack to disable compatibility-checking, or I can install Nightly Tester Tools, an add-on that forces un-appproved add-ons to work with Firefox, and I can probably restore the Location Bar to it's saner, more pristine Firefox 2 state with another about:config tweak. But I don't want to. It's not WORTH it. As I mentioned on Digg tonight (the fanboys dug me down - which I joyfully anticipated), fuck Firefox. With a big fat stick. It took years of messing with half the add-ons ever released to get Firefox how I like it - why try to force them to work in a browser that will puke them back up like day-old Chinese?
Not to mention Mozilla claims the incorrectly-named "memory leak" was fixed? Bullshit. I'm typing this in Firefox 3 just to prove Mozilla lied. This browser uses over 76,000K of RAM just at startup and is using over 95,000K now after only 30 minutes - that's minutes, not hours, not days, not weeks - 30 fucking minutes. Luckily I've got RAM to spare so burning through 387,000K on a typical Firefox 2 session won't bother me.
Conclusion: Use Firefox 2 - Get It Here!
Are you hating Firefox 3 as much as I do? Don't despair...download Firefox 2.0.0.14 from Mozilla, or, if that download fails to work, use the permanent link to Firefox 2 that I am keeping here. Eat your hearts out, Mozilla...you guys really fucked this one up.
Update, 7-13-08: Firefox released version 2.0.0.15 on June 26. I'm not hosting it because you can update Firefox 2 from within the browser and the new version adds nothing but a few security fixes. The permanent link to it is here.
Postscript: this piece of crap is using over over 148,000K of RAM and it's been open an hour. That's an hour - not...
More Postscripts
Postscript 2: Just to prove I'm not full of shit, my disabled add-ons are listed here, here, and here. I didn't screen cap the Disabled Add-Ons the first time I ran FF 3 - I had no idea so many add-ons wouldn't work or I would've - so I can't show anyone that on first run AdBlockPlus was disabled, but take my word for it, it was. I was surfing Digg with so many ads up in my face it looked like Times Square before Guiliani became Mayor.
Postscript 3, 6-19: Tonight most of my add-ons are still disabled, including AdBlockPlus; see latest screencap. I kept Firefox 3 open for a few hours after posting last night to test memory use: it topped out at a little over 195,000K. That sounds hideous - and it is hideous - but it's only half of what Firefox 2 uses after a few hours.
I can't figure out how to replace the Back and Forward buttons so I'm using keyboard shortcuts. I found an add-on on LifeHacker tonight (I'm "emnem" if you ever want to stalk me there) that rolls back the Location Bar to it's Firefox 2 state, but I don't know if I'll use it - I'm still not hot on Firefox 3 as a serious replacement. If they could've just fixed FF 2's so-called "memory leak" and released that as Firefox 3 I'd be happy, but they didn't.
Postscript 4: Just checked add-on updates: getting four back, including ABP. Still no TabMixPlus, and without Back and Forward buttons I feel lost. Alt+Arrow isn't so bad but I have to keep...reminding myself to use the keyboard shortcuts...what a mess.
Postscript 5, 6-19: This is bullshit. I decided to do a hard reset on the browser hoping it would fix the missing-buttons problem. As you can see on the Customize/Reset screen, when I opened it I still had a Location Bar - but once I clicked Reset I lost the Location Bar, the Stop and Reload Buttons and could not restore the Back and Forward buttons, either. I don't know enough keyboard shortcuts to navigate without any buttons, and without the Location bar I had to Google "photobucket.com" to upload the screen shots of how Firefox 3 looks now.
It's unthinkable to me that Mozilla did not:
- Ensure every willing developer was on-board with working versions of their add-ons before Firefox 3 was released...
- Make any so-called "improvements" like the "Awesome Bar" purely optional for the end-user and...
- Ensure that approved add-ons don't destroy your new browser in everyday use (I blame my bizarre missing-buttons-and-Location Bar problem on Tiny Menus).
This is worse than a Beta; I've never used a Beta that gave me this much trouble. Mozilla needed at least another month to get everyone on board and roll this browser out the right way; instead of taking their time and doing it right, they rushed this so-called "Final" version of it and did a hack job in the process.
I've been thinking about its memory usage, too; 195,000K with most of my add-ons disabled? Way too high. Assuming the add-ons work one day the savings will top out at around 50,000K for me, meaning this version will still use over 325,000K of RAM in a typical session. That's not fixing the memory leak, damn it - that's reducing it. I deeply resent that they lied to at least 8 million of us about how much memory Firefox 3 still consumes.
Postscript 6, 6-6: A Google search for "Firefox 3 Sucks" shows this post is now at #5; either my keywords are really, really good or this post has struck a nerve with some people...maybe it's both?
Just Call Me "The Sphinx"
Page Summary
- (Anonymous) : Agreed [+4]
- (Anonymous) : Firefox 3 Sucks [+1]
- (Anonymous) : Agreed!!!! [+1]
- (Anonymous) : Agreed [+1]
- (Anonymous) : Say it Ain't So... Mo [+1]
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jdmatthews.blogspot.com : Glad I'm not the only one... [+1] - (Anonymous) : Annoying [+1]
- (Anonymous) : eh? [+1]
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valadil : (no subject) [+1] - (Anonymous) : firefox 2 download [+0]
- (Anonymous) : (no subject) [+2]
- (Anonymous) : I swear... [+1]
- (Anonymous) : THANK YOU FOR FF2 [+1]
- (Anonymous) : firefox [+1]
- (Anonymous) : firefox 3 sucks bigtime [+1]
- (Anonymous) : FF3 Sucks Ass [+1]
- (Anonymous) : I wholeheartedly agree [+1]
- (Anonymous) : (no subject) [+1]
- (Anonymous) : Additional problems [+3]
- (Anonymous) : COULD NOT AGREE MORE [+0]
- (Anonymous) : Firefox Kool-Aid [+1]
- moblogs.wordpress.com : Moved to Opera [+1]
- (Anonymous) : Noxn sez: [+0]
- (Anonymous) : (no subject) [+3]
- (Anonymous) : (no subject) [+1]
Comments
I googled firefox 3 sucks and am glad I am not alone in reverting back to 2. Thanks for the link.
Edited at 2008-06-20 11:52 pm (UTC)
The little down arrow in the address bar (I don't know what it's called - I'm not that geeky), presented me with what appeared to be a large and random selection of Bookmarks (and not the half-dozen frequently-used links that normally live there). I deleted them - and got a fresh and equally random selection - this, it seems, will continue ad infinitum if allowed to.
There may well have been worse faults - and judging from what I've read on Mozilla's website, and in Google, there are a great many - but that was enough for me, and I binned it. I've reverted to v2.0.0.14, and there'll I stay until they come up with a version that works.
ronsrants.wordpress.com
FF3 was horrible looking with the over bright buttons and the history bar in dis array. I have my bookmarks arranged specifically and FF3 was messing it up and I tried to get rid of the new items in the address bar and it wouldn't let me. Plus, I watch MLB tv and it didn't work as well as many other sites and it was loading way slower. I think Mozilla needs to remember to K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid and come back with a less is more approach again.
Yes, exactly. That's what I loved about Firefox the most. Sorry to see they slid so far away from following that principle with FF 3; now they force plugins and so-called "improvements" down our throats like AOL does with their software - and I am, as anyone can imagine, quite horrified by it.
The address bar's auto-fill history feature is downright ugly and isn't easy to read. Bleh
I had my back/forward buttons in win xp, but organizing bookmarks has caused crashes with Firefox consuming 50% cpu until I kill the process.
The new look is nice and performance is definitely better, but if there's one element of the browser I have to use every time I open up a new window or tab, it's the address bar, and if it won't function the way I need it to (even if it's my fault because I'm an idiot that can't adapt), I just won't use it.
I can understand that it's an innovative approach (at least theoretically), but IMHO it goes against what are proven conventions and norms in the way humans interface with the browser.
The worst part of it is that there's no way to change the behavior to function in the more natural way that it did in FF2, and currently works in Safari and IE (that's right, I said it again... IE). You can tweak it in the about:config screen, but there's no way to make it work the way it did -- not even with the OldBar add-on. I was really looking forward to FireFox 3... Now, the next version of Safari seems to be my only hope. ...I'm a Mac guy now.
Also, I forgot to mention... The fact that "Check spelling as I type" doesn't work in text fields -- only textareas, seems like a bit of an oversight at best, though I would describe it more accurately as a complete embarrassment.
I found a way to get the Location Bar the way you want it again; it takes just a few quick hacks in about:config and about thirty seconds. Details are here. I was sort of stunned to learn how easy it was.
"I can understand that it's an innovative approach (at least theoretically), but IMHO it goes against what are proven conventions and norms in the way humans interface with the browser."
I'd shake your hand if you were standing in front of me. I could not agree more. They forgot about the user altogether when they got to the Awesome Bar. It's Awesome perhaps in theory (as in, "Wow! Look what this browser can do!") but most people don't need all the dynamite up in the address bar so I think it's overkill. I'm a type-and-go girl myself; I type fast and get to what I want quick. I have dozens of URLs memorized. Anything that I'm over-consumptive on I use Speed Dial for, the rest I just type-and-go.
"Also, I forgot to mention... The fact that "Check spelling as I type" doesn't work in text fields.."
There's a hack to fix that, too; check the same LifeHacker post that discusses the Oldbar add-on. I'm pretty sure I saw the about:config hack there.
I was excited for FF3, especially after hearing all the buzz, and most specifically because I was told it wouldn't be such a memory hog. Hmmm...well, that didn't pan out, because FF3 consistently stole about 20k more memory than FF2 does. It's ridiculous.
I could've lived with the address bar spitting out all of the Mozilla pages and my recent history, though I didn't like it. However, the fact that the browser FAILED to load SEVERAL pages in that recent history put the nails in the coffin. FF3 does not like Blogspot addresses, and isn't real friendly with Myspace either. And forget it if I went to a download site.
I will be sticking with FF2, until such time as Mozilla gets their crap together.
:) but seriously, i hope you work out your ffx problems.
What are you talking about? Did you read my post? It's about my experience with FF 3 - not anyone else's. The anecdotes are found only in the comments - and I like those comments because I like knowing I'm not the only one who hates this version of FF.
I don't care if other people use FF 3 or not. In fact, I could've pulled the FF 3 download links off my other blog (on two posts that show people leaving AOL how to use Firefox) but I chose not to. People who've always used AOL's browsers don't know Firefox from a hole in the wall, so I'm not worried they'll dislike the new version of it as much as I do.
Other than that I haven't experienced any of your other problems. Maybe they're OS specific as I haven't been affected in Ubuntu.
That's true. More ancedotal evidence of that is in this comment:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo
I only realized that was the case when I wrote my follow-up last night. I kept the toolbars - all of them - disabled in FF2 because with the Tiny Menus add-on you don't have to enable them once you compress your buttons, address and search bar into one toolbar like I do. So I didn't think to enable the address bar in FF3 until last night and even then I didn't think to go to Customize again and look for all the missing buttons one more time - chances are it was all in there after the reset, but I re-installed FF 3 at that point and that seemed to fix the problem.
interesting. when I tried to do that it told me it couldn't (?!) so how did you set up your drives? thanks in advance
ps yes I did have major problems with FF3 and I'm running windows 2000 SP4 with a fast chip and more than enough RAM
Firefox was "most-loved" so I installed 2.0.0.14 on the D:\ drive. I didn't want to overwrite my precious Firefox 2 installation so I chose the C:\ drive for FF 3.
This has one weird effect: switching between 2 and 3 makes FF 2 "think" it just got updated to 2.0.0.14 and brings you to the "You're using the latest version of Firefox" page. It makes FF 3 "think" you just installed it and brings you the "Thank you for downloading Firefox" page. Every single time you open either browser after you ran the other version! No other ill effects from it, though, which is a relief considering how hard it is to recapture everything you can lose in Firefox, like about:config tweaks, add-ons, themes, preferences, bookmarks...
Then again, I haven't tried running both versions at once! :)
If you're seeking a how-to for that, I like this one (it's for Windows users - you might need to adapt it slightly for Windows 2000):
http://www.shankrila.com/tech-stuff/h
Like you, I did a parallel install of FF3 and simply uninstalled FF3 and went back to my beloved FF2.
Dogmeat
And the lack of compatible add-ons - tell me, what was it that made almost none of the developers want to work with Mozilla to get their add-ons ready for Firefox 3? I understand most unavailable add-ons are being sandboxed, so to speak, for not providing secure updates, which is required now to make sure no nasties are installed...but still. To this day I'm using no theme at all because JapanBlackMAX Experimental was a mess the last time I checked and hundreds, if not thousands of once-available themes are unavailable. Half the add-ons I'm using are force-installed.
And the browser is using much more RAM than FF 2 - I tend to open dozens of tabs sometimes all at once, then read each page and go to the next one, and that can take me hours, so in the meantime the tabs just stay open. In those hours my RAM usage has climbed as high as 423MB recently...the memory is still not "locking up" as bad as it did in FF 2, but FF 3 is using 100MB more RAM to keep the same amount of tabs open. And it crashed on me the other night - I was trying to close 125 tabs at once (I know, I know) and bam, it crashed.
If it took "over 15,000 improvements!" to get it to this pitiful state then I wonder how many more it will take to hammer a decent browser out of it. If it wasn't for my serious add-on addiction I'd switch to Opera (the latest version of Opera is always on my computer) - it's the fastest browser on Earth, it's cool-looking, and it renders pages better than Firefox does. That's right, I said better. The rendering is much cleaner and neater to my eyes. Things have a way of looking...much better in FF than they do in IE, but still its rendering is a bit sloppy compared to Opera's. Oh, well.
Edited at 2008-06-25 09:01 pm (UTC)
To you and everyone else who has thanked me for hosting the installer, you're welcome - I figured it might come in handy :).
(edited to add--->) Mozilla still hosts Firefox 2.0.0.14 here:
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/moz
I'll add a link to the original post soon.
I'm using Firefox 2 now after a week of using nothing but Firefox 3 - and my relief at returning to the old version of it is enormous. It just "feels" better to me.
Edited at 2008-06-25 10:27 pm (UTC)
2 version is so much better
3 sucks balls!
Firefox 2 was way better.
My advice now is opera. Hope mozilla will come quickely with firefox 4.
http://i287.photobucket.com/albums/ll12
That's the screen shot I took right before I force-killed the damn thing. I only have 1GB of RAM and FF 3 was taking nearly half of it. I was trying to install a huge load of crap from MS tonight and the install was almost done when bam! the computer froze because of FF 3. I couldn't do anything except Ctrl-Alt-Delete and make it go away.
Then I re-opened FF 3 to unscreen your comment and decided to preview a pic I was uploading to Photobucket for my reply when bam! Firefox crashed.
I couldn't get the last two or three versions of FF 2 to crash no matter how many add-ons I loaded it up with (and as you can see from my PB screen caps I am truly an add-on addict) or how long I ran it or how many hundreds of tabs I kept open - with FF 3 I can open three tabs, right-click a picture to preview it, and bam!, it's gone.
It also crashes every time I use it's built-in Bookmark Organizer. I mean every time - there are no exceptions. I like to keep my Bookmarks under control, so that is a huge problem.
I'm taking my time with this clean install of FF 3 to figure out what's wrong with it and the problems are indeed piling up.
- Like how the password manager doesn't remember passwords so I have to enter then over and over again just to access the same 3 sites
- How there are funny cursors in all the web pages because FF 3 doesn't hide them when they're not in use but instead puts them wherever you're pointing in the web page, or wherever you last clicked, and how there are huge form-sized cursors in web page forms (today I had a cursor on Anti-AOL's update page that, no shit, ran the length of the form, which made it over a foot long!)
- How I see that RAM usage is actually worse in FF 3 than it was in FF 2
- How I've had to lower my web page cache from 50MB to ZERO or FF 3 reloads pages I edit, screwing me up because that makes me think my changes didn't take correctly
- How highlighting text to cut it or copy it means you have to hold the mouse absolutely still or you wind up dragging and dropping text all over the web page you're working on
- How I'm still using Nightly Tester Tools to keep the add-ons I want force-installed, and how at least six of those add-ons must be maintained this way until God knows when
It's as frustrating as hell.
Edited at 2008-07-04 06:40 am (UTC)
I'm with you on that. Except it's the browser I'd like to check into a mental hospital - not me.
"Recent Headlines" is the worst nightmare out of all of the changes they made because if you don't delete that Bookmark immediately after installing Firefox and before you click on it you'll be sorry - clicking on it even once will auto-load all the Recent Headlines (default is 100, I think) into your "Recent Bookmarks" from now until the day the world ends.
That so-called "feature" resulted in tons of so-called "Recent Bookmarks" that I never even visited loading and annoyed the crap out of me because the problem isn't even fixable - when you try to delete "Recent Headlines" from "Recent Bookmarks" they're replaced immediately with the next batch of "Recent Headlines" (FF streams them so they'll never stop coming unless you just delete that Bookmark - and I wanted to keep that Bookmark, so that made the problem much harder for me to deal with).
If this was a feature of say, AOL's software, it would be hilarious - everyone would say how damn annoying and stupid it was and make fun of it - but it's a Firefox feature so we're all supposed to bow and cringe at the sheer genius of it - right? No thanks.
And yes, FF 3's memory usage is total suckage. I agree - I've never seen anything like it. It's the only software I've ever used - that includes AOL's most RAM-guzzling offerings, which I test for my other blog but don't actually use - that I fear might actually eat my RAM alive. And I shouldn't have to sit here and be afraid of my browser.
I reinstalled FF 2 today for the second time in two weeks and this time I'm keeping it on my XP and Vista installs permanently. I'll never mess around with Firefox 3 again.
LOL, dumbass, stay on your Momma's AOL Parental Controls where you belong and use the chat rooms. They're for idiots like you. If there were "fixes" for half the shit that's wrong with FF 3 I wouldn't write about it - I'd "fix" it.
Edited at 2008-07-07 01:45 am (UTC)
Occassionallyevery few seconds when I'm loading new pages, Firefox freezes and stays like that for 2-3 seconds, amazingly slowing down my whole computer. Then it resumes at normal, and freezes again in a couple of seconds. When all pages (tabs) are loaded, it doesn't have problems at all. I have 2GB or RAM and an AMD dual processor 1 year old! How good a machine does it require!? Same thing happens on Linux to a colleague of mine, at work (he had those GTK libraries). I think I'll switch back to FF2. This is embarrassing.Edited at 2008-07-09 12:57 am (UTC)
Just keep drinking the Kool-Aid and it will be OK...
It is slower but also aesthetically annoying. I don't like how the bookmark system pops up when I just want to access, not add, and the Fisher Price buttons and colours seem patronising. I wasn't a big add-ons user at all so my migration to Opera has been very easy. In fact, allowing myself time to train to, it I like it better than any browser so far.
However, I would've not tried anything else if FF3 really were better than FF2, but I was surely disappointed.
But Firefox 2 is still my favorite, for all that plus the other add-ons I use (the list is extensive). If I wasn't such an add-on addict I'd be on Opera 24/7 already; the lack of customizations (especially not being able to set up tabs like I do with Tab Mix Plus) is really the only thing holding me back.
As to Thunderbird, never had anything but problems with it, which is why I still use (don't laugh, it's actually pretty cool) POP Peeper. I can configure it to send/receive from any account so it may be a bit plain, but it suits my needs, and it stays out of my way.
I'm still hoping that we all finally get what we want in the next version of Firefox so I can re-join the world of updated-browser users again - this is the first time in my life I've ever continued to use an older browser when a newer version was available, and I'm not happy about it. If Firefox 3 was (literally) not such a crashing disappointment that would not be the case.
I don't want Firefox to become to me like jv16 PowerTools did - jv16 made the best version of their software ever in 2006, and there is just no reason to upgrade to the newer versions since they are slower, buggier, and don't do as good of a job. I fear Firefox also saw it's best days in 2006-2007, and I will never upgrade if they don't fix the issues with the latest version in the next release.
"Dear FF3, Fuck Off, eat shit and then die!"
I hope they remake it 100%!
Also I thought everyone who knew anything about computing knew to be wary of x.0 releases and bleeding-edge technology. Submit your gripes as bug reports, and keep using firefox 2.x until 3.1 comes out. Maybe things will work better for you.
I haven't experienced any of the problems you're griping about, but then again I'm not trying to run 18+ add-ons, either.
And "vitriolic"? Coming from me, that post is like a love-letter, my friend. You should hear me when I really get mad - ask around. Sure, I could submit a bunch of bug reports addressing my every grievance, and maybe 3 devs would read them and not a damn thing would be done about any of it, since as Asa Dotzler, Firefox's chief mouthpiece, has indicated, Firefox is not implementing any of the changes that it's new detractors like me are clamoring for.
Or I could write this post, which has helped me on more levels than you can imagine: it let me vent my anger at the makers of what was my favorite software of all time (I still love FF 2 like a baby, I swear), it got me a lot more views than my bug reports would have (in the area of 400-500 based on the few stats I have, since I didn't start using a stats counter until a week ago), it helped me learn other people are as unhappy with the new software as I am, and it let those people air their grievances, too. And if Mozilla devs are playing any attention at all to what I wrote, all the better. I would call that a win-win all-around, and no one suffered any real harm in the process, so what are you complaining about?
"...wary of x.0 releases?" If that were true no one would ever be able to safely use new and/or updated versions of CCleaner or HijackThis or a hundred different types of software that constantly get updated or re-released as new versions - just give me a break. That's bullshit.