My Experiences with Firefox 3.0 on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X
Well I guess I should join the Firefox 3 review bandwagon. I’ve been using Firefox 3 since beta 5, which came bundled with the new version of Ubuntu. I also upgraded my browsers on both my PC and MacBook, so I got an impression of the browser’s functions, bugs and most importantly speed on all of the three major platforms, except Vista of course, but Vista sucks, so why bother. Get your read on, I’ll be starting with:
Windows XP SP3
I’ve been using Firefox on XP for a long, long time and there were a lot of plugins which ceased to function. The most important ones worked, though. So I uninstalled all of the old ones and gave some alternatives a shot. The upgrade went pretty smoothly, although the plugin compatibility check took a considerable amount of time. What you can really notice is the increase in speed. As a matter of fact, it runs almost as quickly as on Linux. I don’t like the theme they used for XP, though it’s interesting to see that the larger Back button isn’t stupid design at all, on the contrary, it makes work faster.
Ubuntu Linux 8.04
Loads up in three seconds, a real rocket! Firefox 3 integrates with your GTK+ theme, so you’ve got some cool visual consistency going on which is actually an exception in Linux. A problem many reviewers forget to tell you about is that even though this is great for GNOME or XFCE, KDE 4 ain’t no beauty with FF3. It just uses the ugly default GTK theme if you don’t do any tweaking. Uuuuugly… If you want to use Firefox with KDE 4, I recommend you use this theme.
Firefox is a great browser for Linux and is probably the most widely used one, but note that even though the final version of FF 3.0 is far better than the beta, it crashes more and has more bugs than the other major browser, Opera 9.5 for Linux. I personally experience the worst crashes when trying to print stuff.
Mac OS X
It’s probably got something to do with my config: Firefox 3 needs about 8-10 seconds to load in Mac OS X. I like the way they changed the theme for the Mac, now it looks like a part of the OS, so thumbs up for that. Somehow, I can’t get ScribeFire to work with Firefox on the Mac – it’s a big problem for me, so currently I’m staying with Flock on the Mac, because FF 3.0 crashes repeatedly when I’m doing complex stuff, like running a lot of tabs with Java and Flash or have more than 10 tabs open at the same time.
Are you using Firefox 3? How do you feel about it?
I’m running Firefox 3 on Sabayon Linux. I personally haven’t had any problems with it crashing. I do, however, take serious issue with the new file upload field. In case you haven’t noticed, clicking inside the text input portion launches the file manager instead of allowing you to do anything with the text. It’s pretty confusing until you realize what’s going on, especially since the default Linux theme doesn’t make it obvious that you can’t type there. It’s ended up becoming an enormous annoyance for me, especially since this introduced problems like being unable to delete the file or intuitively copy the text.
I’m using Firefox 3 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, whenever I try to open 24 tabs at once if crashes on me, and it seems slow loading certain pages also.
I’ve been using FF3 on Ubuntu 8.04 and I’ve noticed that it crashes less than FF2, though it crashed very few times, anyway. Loading tons of tabs (30+) doesn’t seem to kill Firefox on my system, but I don’t know why someone would have more than 15 tabs open. I’m using GNOME and the default theme seems to integrate flawlessly.
I’ve test installed vanilla FF3 on a Debian/testing machine and immediately switched back to FF2 on seeing that the image rendering and, or resizing in FF3 based on (lib)cairo engine is still in its infancy and, or full of bugs; I think, the FF3 people are more focused on Windows these days than Linux, the heard of such users won this time again
FF3 on Mac OS X is dead slow on loading first time. I really like the default theme of FF3 in Mac OS X, it really integrates with the Mac theme.
FF3 is really fast on Linux
Sorry, I don’t want to talk about FF3 on Windows.
I was eagerly awaiting for an update, and the FF 3.0.1 did the magic, everything is working fine now, particularly the image rendering and scaling, which is known as zooming among FF developers.
Thanks, the Foxes are way ahead in rectifying the flaws and, or prompt enough in making a new release.
Send to me the file to upgrade Firefox 3.0 on my Ubuntu 8.04. please.
Thanks
@Phan Tan Tai:
From a shell:
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install firefox
Or you can use Adept to search for the firefox package and upgrade through there.