Firefox 2 To Firefox 3 - Is It Worth Upgrading? Lets settle this matter once and for all.

[boxed 0]

Yepp, i damn love Firefox 3! , you should go for it

[Gregarious 0]

When I first saw it, the address bar stood out massively. It looked useful, since you could pretty much search with it, but it was garishly ugly. Luckily, "oldbar" lets you go back to the original design of the navbar with the search-y feature still intact. It's beyond useful and I now can't stand using IE, which obviously doesn't have it. That said, I do notice speed problems with it at times as it loads my history though they're much better than the overall speed problems with IE when you turn it on =P Anyhow, that's besides the point. I'd say that F3 is worth getting just for the new address bar, which is pretty darn awesome. There are some other cool new features too, but they hardly compare.

[NJ_STORM 0]

FF is nice, and upgrading it is a very good idea also. But saidly there some websites that well don't work well or at all with Firefox 1 or 2. Thank goodness for IE. Only thing that I do not care for with FF is all the little add ons. For someone that knew FF very well it's okay but for someone that is very new to it, It is a headach of sorts trying to figure it all out. I felt that way when I first started to use it.

[diiiii 0]

I have firefox 2and it works fineif I updated to 3 I wouldn't see why...I don't use firefox much anyways..I use the cute lolifoxbecause I like anime and stuff

[varalu 0]

Yes it is. There are so many performance issues that has been resolved and it supports so many tabs. I am telling you this because, previously i firefox used to crash so many times when the number of tabs grows beyond a limit... Now thats not happening.

[kobra500 1]

they stole a lot from Opera though

was that written negitively?

in the computing world, stealing and adapting ideas from rival browsers is a good thing, everyone makes it out to be bad, however, if you think for a second you'll realise why, sometimes people dont all have the same ideas, so they make a browser without stealing any from your rivals and your left having to use 2 or 3 browsers because 1 doesn't do everything. It's like this

"OS X is better because Microsoft stole ideas from it" , yes and throughout time Mac os stole ideas from microsoft, and visa versa, it doesn't matter, that saves you having to dual boot windows and a really bad os such as Mac OS x or in fact every peace of terrible software apple has ever written. I'm no Bill Gates fan, far from it in fact , but even i have to admit his stuff is good!

I will start using linux but not till i get my new computer, my current can't run it.

Anyway back to the point at hand , firefox 3 is very good, I remember Beta 3, the only issue I had was the style, no Home button i think. anyway they've fixed it and most of my addons have been updating recenly. It looks good, sounds good and is good with some outstanding features.

Oh and also, i'm back online now

[rayzoredge 2]

I was in OP's position for a good while, wondering if it was worth upgrading from FF2 to FF3. I've installed FF3 on my work machine and had some nitpicks, but after eventually upgrading all of my personal computers with FF3, I haven't really noticed much to gripe about.A lot of improvements to the browser isn't going to be noticed by Joe Schmoe. I haven't reviewed the changes and improvement list yet or just don't remember them, but I'm sure that a whole new world is opened up for web developers. From the average user's point of view, we'd probably only notice the address bar, the download history, and maybe the lessened possibility of crashes. I don't know what people are talking about with the "fixed" memory leak issue... the process still is a RAM hog, but since I have 2GB of RAM, I'll trade stability and security for resources at this point. In short, upgrading to FF3 hasn't left me in a tizzy, and I've been able to use FF3 as easily as FF2 without having to scramble to find where things are or have to learn anything new. It's still the same great browser, but with a lot of improvements in the background that not a lot of average users will actually discover to appreciate.

[samlockart 0]

I'm really LOVING firefox 3, I have been using it since beta 1 and it's GREAT, the nav bar is AMAZING now and I can't really picture me going back to firefox 2. The only con is that not all plugins are supported... yet.

also this should make firefox a happier faster browser


cheers, sam.

PS pop one of these in the nav-bar:

about:robots
about:mozilla

Edited June 23, 2008 by samlockart (see edit history)

[Forbez 0]

Yes, yes yes and guess what? Yes. But give it a couple of weeks lol. I believe there are still a few bugs, none that I've experienced but their probably is. Wait for the next update or something. What I found frustrating was that I had a very organised Links bar, which I've now lost. I had to rebuild it all over again.But it is a vast improvement from Firefox 2.0, lots of changes. Reminds me a lot of Opera though - less stolen like my previous statement.

Edited June 23, 2008 by Forbez (see edit history)

[rpgsearcherz 5]

I would upgrade just because even if it's not better in terms of the things you can visually see, it may have updates to security, crashing issues, etc.Usually the only things that I do NOT upgrade immediately are those released by Microsoft.

[gameratheart 0]

Usually the only things that I do NOT upgrade immediately are those released by Microsoft.

That made me laugh so hard! But yeah, Microsoft are known to do a few *sneaky things* with their updates, so always best to find out what they actually do first.

 

Back to the topic at hand, and well, looks like everybody is for Firefox 3. I'll give it another whirl to see if it's "for me", but if everybody else is happy then I have high hopes.

 

And to clear up something I said earlier, no, I was not expecting anybody to post a double-sided debate on this matter. My question asked for an opinion, which is always a "yes" or "no". Ok, I misphrased what I meant by saying that "everybody seemed one-sided" - what I really meant was "everybody seems to be for the one side". That was just another example of how speaking in your native language doesn't mean you know it well.

[litchy 0]

I don't really see any advantages that any user would make upgrading to 3 but i haven't looked into it enough to say. I find firefox 2 to be more than enough at the present moment, the usual browsing, downloading etc. I would like to see perhaps a better download manager come with it, but thats all.Are their just beta's out? Or actual final editions?

[Janissary 0]

BEta is over.

[TheKoolAidGuy 0]

In my opinion if you use a lot of plugins and such i would not upgrade untill all the creators have had a chance to upgrade there stuff.

[electriic ink 1]

In my opinion if you use a lot of plugins and such i would not upgrade untill all the creators have had a chance to upgrade there stuff.

On the topic of extensions, I think it's amazing how little you actually rely on them. Whenever Firefox is upgraded I always manage to uninstall all but five or six of my extensions just because when they suddenly don't work, I realise that they weren't that necessary at all. Besides, all the popular extensions like Adblock and ForecastFox have been compatible with Fx3 since the beta versions came out. On top of that, quite a few extensions are actually compatible with the newest version despite claiming they're not. To find out if your old extensions are compatible, type about:config into the address bar awesome bar , find extensions.checkCompatibility and set the value to "false". (You may need to create a new boolean value yourself if it doesn't exist. To do this, right click anywhere, select New -> Boolean - the rest should be fairly obvious.) Be aware this might damage your browser. If it does, start Firefox in safe-mode and simply change the said value to "true".

 

My only really concern would be that Firefox 3.0.0.0 is quite vulnerable and there will be many security fixes come 3.0.0.1. But this isn't really much cause for concern; if you're careful and only browse respectable sites, you'll be fine.