Atanu Dey On India's Development

Warning: Don’t install Firefox 3

June 19, 2008 by Atanu Dey

I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 and instantly regretted it. I have been struggling for the last couple of hours to access my Google toolbar bookmarks and it is not working. I even attempted to roll back to Firefox 2 but now even FF 2 does not work.

Consider yourself warned. FF 3 sucks.

  • http://www.aseem.net/blog/ Aseem Bajaj

    > I have been struggling for the last couple of
    > hours to access my Google toolbar
    > bookmarks and it is not working.

    So it’s really the Google Toolbar that has been updated for Firefox 3 that isn’t working. Feel free to redirect your emotions towards Google now. :)

    BTW, I have been using Firefox 3 beta for many months now, and I had to live without the Google toolbar (which is not unfair). But it was only recently that Google toolbar got upgraded to Firefox 3. I am happy to have my toolbar back, but I don’t use the bookmarks there. So I am sorry I can’t help you with this issue.

  • lurker

    Well atleast you haven’t lost your bookmarks; they are safe somewhere in cyberspace. Firefox 3 is supposed to be VERY much improved from Firefox 2; so don’t give up so soon. I have switched to a Mac but I am going to give Firefox a try now since it is supposed to be better than Safari.
    pc

  • Amit

    I’ve been using FF 3.0 for a few weeks and it is a much better product than FF 2.0 when it comes to memory use and overall functionality. I, of couse, didn’t have Google Toolbar installed, so that didn’t affect me. Best of all is the add-on feature called Ad Block Plus. Now I can read news and articles without any stupid and distracting animated ads. Goodbye dancing leperchauns and crawling insects and all that crap that advertisers think of, and could put their brains to better use.

  • dp.chalasani

    Firefox 3 rocks! I think if you use the del.icio.us bookmarking feature you won’t have a problem with disappearing bookmarks.

  • lurker

    Hi Atanu,

    I have been using FF3 for more than a week now. There are some issues here and there, but overall, it works very well. They have made quite a few js related memory consumption improvements. Gmail is noticeably faster. Unicode works much better. And so on..

    May it is just that you are in a particularly nasty mood, courtesy Ratan Tata.

    -Hari

  • http://www.deeshaa.org Atanu Dey

    Finally after hours of frustration, I have figured out how to make the Google toolbar bookmark feature work on FF 3. See reports of bookmarks not working and the related bug report.

    It is work around but a clumsy one.

  • lurker

    i’m really surprised you’d declare “FIREFOX SUCKS” just because one add-on hasn’t yet been upgraded for the new firefox.
    you must remember that google provides the toolbar, and not firefox and the firefox guys don’t have to tweak their browser so that the add-ons work…. it’s the other way around.
    there a hell lot of plugins that don’t work for firefox 3 yet… but it’s just come out of beta so you can expect things to get cleared in a week or so.
    your post should have been titled “Bug in firefox 3″ and go on to explain what the problem is, instead of making ill-informed sweeping generalizations.
    and how many people use the google toolbar anyway? and for how many is it so central that firefox would simply suck if it would stop supporting google toolbar?

  • http://www.deeshaa.org Atanu Dey

    Nit pick: I did not say that FF sucks. I wrote, “FF 3 sucks.”

    Google is very closely tied to Mozilla and therefore to FF. The Google toolbar is an important and useful add-on. One comes to rely on it as a feature of the FF browser, even though it is not strictly part of the browser. A major release of the browser hastily pushed out the door with obvious bugs does not serve anyone well — not Mozilla and certainly not the users.

    Finally, my post is a warning — the sort that I wish I had before I upgraded. If my warning saves half a dozen people a few hours of frustrations, I think it is worth it. I am not complaining about FF but only warning that FF 3 has problems and if you are using FF 2, be careful about upgrading immediately.

    Also, this is a personal blog. Everything that I write here has the implicit disclaimer that this is my view and YMMV. No warranties expressed or implied; there are no penalties for totally dismissing my opinion out of hand.

  • chandana

    FF3 is great! You don’t have to type the complete URL, just a couple of keywords for each website that you browsed in the past. Type reader if you want to access ‘Google Reader’ and you can see a dropdown list of all urls that have this keyword in the title or the URL. They are all ranked by the number of visits to a particular link, so your most visited sites are a few word entries away.

    As somebody already suggested, del.icio.us bookmarks plugin is a nice tool.