Firefox 3: Another View
Following Cheezy's review of Firefox 3, I thought I'd get in on the act. I've used Firefox for a long time and, quite frankly, there's no better browser out there. Opera is over-rated; I.E. is best ignored. Konqueror has always been very fast, but not widely compatible with all websites, is KDE-baed and has a file manager that gets in the way; Epiphany is a great GNOME-based lightweight browser, but isn't available on other platforms. Safari is a very good browser, but it takes an age to start up and doesn't use standard buttons, which is frustrating when you aren't using OSX.
Firefox. on the other hand, has always been very reliable, fast, if needing a lot of memory, compatible with most of the Internet since it started to get more widely adopted and is generally very good, with the slight drawbacks of an on-going memory leak and a tendency to crash. However, with version 3, these issues have been rectified.
The first thing I notice about Firefox 3 is that it runs incredibly fast. It starts almost instantly and is much more responsive. It looks a little different, but that's no real problem - you can alwayd theme it yourself. The new folders for your most visited links are not a great help to me, but I'm sure they are to lots of people. However, like Cheezy, the new form the address bar takes is a real disappointment. I don't want Firefox to start searching everything when I'm clearly typing in the start of an address. It makes the rest of the address impossible to find when you don't know the exact address and there are 50 other very similar addresses that Firefox has found. There should be an option to turn that off.
Other than that, Firefox 3 is very good. It's certainly more sturdy than it has been before, and its speed evokes more confidence, but that fricking address bar is incredibly frustrating.
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