FireFox 3

Anyone taken the plunge yet with Firefox 3?

It keeps popping up in my browser that it is available to download. I'm tempted, but it says the plugins you have may not work, and I use a lot. So for now I don't want the hassle since Firefox 2 is working fine.

Firefox 3 is a nice browser, running since some time now and no complains so far. I only had to change one plugin which wasn't available but i found another one which does the job now. It also feels faster than Firefox2, in my opinion already worth the update.

I also checked out the threaded WorldBrowser which on my system was the fastest Browser i've used so far.

-> http://www.ioage.com/en/index.htm

I'm using it and it's a very nice browser

Its great.

No probs whatsoever on either Ubuntu, fedora, Xp or Vista, Unlike early-day-FF2 which ran really badly on windows.

I like it ok on my XP machine at work, but I hated it on my Mac.

Every once in a while on the Mac it would just stop loading pages, and I couldn't quit the app. I'd have to force quit the app and open it again to continue browsing. So, I switched to Safari. This was the initial 3.0 release, so I don't know if any of the patches since then have fixed that issue (and don't care enough to reinstall it and find out).

On Windows, it's great. Much better than IE, of course, and it seems about the same as Firefox 2 performance-wise. Maybe a little faster. The one thing I dislike about it is the "AwesomeBar" which I find to be less than awesome. Basically, they changed the way the location bar works, so now when you start typing it goes through your bookmarks in addition to your history. Some people like that and some people don't. There's some plug-ins that can make it emulate the old behavior if you're one of the latter.

no problems here. The portable install sucked (had issues) but the full install is good!

It is my favorite browser too. However, I'm afraid that Firefox keeps getting bigger and heavier through the years (new features should be programmed through plugins I think).

Been using FF3 since the day it was released. It still does things that irritate me, like when it forgets all of its settings for no apparent reason, or gets stuck running in the background after you've closed it. The worst thing about FF3 was that it insists on scanning every file you download, and its not quick in doing it.

You can turn that feature off but its buried in the advanced config settings.

IE8 is looking quite nice.

I have been using FF3 for a while. No issues with it. Though, if you use Tab Mix Plus, you have to go to the Tab Mix Plus website and get a dev build as they have not officially released it for FF3 yet.

I moved to FF3 a little while back - broke most of the javascript front-ends but not as serious as IE crap. Use it all the time now and find it quite intuitive, especially the address bar.

See ya...

I like Firefox 3 a lot more than Firefox 2; it loads faster and looks prettier (at least on OS X). However, most of the time I'm still using Safari.

FF3 is nice. I use it as a portable app (portableapp.com), which is really useful.

However, my main browser remains as Opera. Just can't beat it.

I switched from IE to FF3 after mistakenly downloading the latest IE beta which was a real pile of doggy doo. FF3 seems pretty similar, the one thing I do like in FF is the realtime spellcheck :)

Like GFK, if I close it down and start it up again soon after, it sometimes wont start because its still running an old version in the BG that I already closed. Otherwise its nice.

I should add - since I turned off download scanning, this hasn't happened once in FF3, whereas it happened a few times a day prior to that. So for now I'm assuming that there are some funky goings on with the FF download manager.

(Go into about:config and set browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone to 'False')

No problems here - in fact it's the default with the latest Ubuntu releases. Plugin compatibility is the only gotcha, as you say.

Been using it since the public release of beta1, and have since got the final version installted on both my WinXP & Leopard setups without issue.

I have found it unbearable in Ubuntu, often eating my input at a deep level and then deciding to hang, leaving my system unusable until it wakes up. It may blend in with GTK now, but Mozilla really dropped the ball with regards to Linux support. I wish Linux distros would stop supporting it so maybe this mess would get addressed, but instead Ubuntu and co. continue to mindlessly ship the thing as if it is actually good for end users.

Suffice it to say, I went back to Epiphany and am so far very happy with my desktop integrated, d-bus enhanced, HIG-compliant web browser. I can't wait for the Webkit version to be finalized so I can drop this dependency on Gecko for good! Even outside of Firefox that thing causes weird lockups.

Having said that, compared to Firefox 2, Firefox 3 is an improvement. If it was not for those issues, I would still be using it since the interface changes are superbly cool. Being better standards-compliant is a good touch, too. (Although it is notable that Webkit already passes Acid 3).
In Windows, it works well ;)

Personally i'm using Safari on OSX and FF3 on Windows. At the moment this seems to be the best solution for me. If you want the same on both sides you also can use FF3 on OSX, working quite nicely whilst the whole integration on windows sems to be better.

FF3 is a nice browser and hey don't forget you get it for free as well as a lot of the plugins.

The problem with browser stability in linux is mostly because of Flash. The offical flash plugin sucks and is the reason for most crashes using any browser. Hopefully Gnash gets fully flash9 compliant so we will get a stable and a free flash plugin.

And then there will be Flash10.

Thanks guys.
I am official with FF3 :)

Sadly though, my realplayer save youtube video plugin doesn't work anymore :(

it keeps going offline for me,
back to Opera!

Yeah the free one is 'iffy'. I always use the proprietry plugins for video/flash as they work much better.

The proprietary plugin sucks majorly. It crashes all the time (for linux). This is why we need a stable plugin. Gnash is probably more stable than the linux flash 9 plugin, but lacks some features. That is why I said that Gnash needs more work to get better swf support, so we will finally get a stable browser 'experience' for linux. Yet another reason not to support closed source companies..

I like the interface so far

For want of playing devils avocate:

Firefox now stands as everything it was against, it's bloaty, slow and pointless. People are only using it because it's not IE, but lets face it, IE7 isn't a bad browser and has easily caught up with FF. The only reason to use FF is for it's web developer plug ins.