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June 17, 2008

In case you haven't heard, the latest full release version of Firefox came out of beta today. There was a push by Mozilla to have the largest number of downloads in one 24 hour period, which apparently caused some server issues, and I'm not sure that I remember hype over a browser like this in a long time.

I downloaded the beta version a couple of weeks ago, looking forward to having a Firefox that used fewer resources, and it does that, for sure. Even with several tabs open, it's far lighter than the previous version. That alone makes me love it, and just adds to the fabulousness of its developer features, which I can't live without.

There is one thing that makes me cringe though.

I absolutely despise the new url bar -- oh sorry, awesome bar. I hate it so much that last night, I convinced myself that they would start considering it a bug rather than an improvement and that it would be fixed before the final release, and I uninstalled 3.0 beta and reinstalled the previous version.

Obviously I was wrong. It wasn't a bug. But it's annoying as hell. Lucky for me, I'm not the only one who thinks that, and instructions have been put up on several sites about how to get rid of it. I actually had to change the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults setting to zero though, to get rid of the feature.

Now that that's gone, my url bar isn't what it used to be, but the rest of the package still has a familiar look and feel. They have moved the password manager dialogue to the top of the page, and the download manager is slightly different, but otherwise it is similar enough to the old version that I don't feel like I have to completely re-learn my lifeline to the web.

I would be super happy if they would add the option to have a classic url bar rather than the new one, without having to disable the remember feature completely, and I'm a little worried about how a couple of sites display differently in the new version than they did in the previous one. But, on its first official day of life, I'm not going to be too rough on it.

Change is good...

By kim | Permalink | Comments (0)