the tindog coffeehouse

Like many loyal Firefox users, I couldn’t wait for the launch of Firefox 3, which was released yesterday. After trying several times to get to the site, I was finally able to download it last night and install it on my home computer.

I haven’t had time yet to really play with it, but I would say it does feel a little faster than the previous version. I’m not quite sold on the look of it yet, though. (FF3 is themed a little different for each platform. On Vista it has more of the Vista look and feel, on OS X it has more of the Mac’s look and feel, etc.) But the one thing that seemed to be an issue initially was the compatibility issues with a few of my add-ons.

The All-in-One Sidebar, New Tab Button, and 1-Click Weather add-ons haven’t (yet) been updated to run on the new version. I found a suitable replacement for the weather add-on and can easily work around the loss of the others. It’s just going to take a little getting used to on my part. I also had some issues with the NewTabURL add-on, which may require rolling back to a previous version.

Overall, it’s not bad. There are some really great things with this release (memory and performance improvements, a resizable search bar, and a more robust address bar), but it definitely feels more evolutionary than revolutionary.

One thing I’m really anxious about, however, is Flock 2.0, which just went into beta. Flock is another browser, which is built on the Firefox engine but also integrates a lot of social networking and media sites into it. So if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, etc., you can integrate all your accounts into Flock and have everything right at your fingertips.

I played with version 1.2 and really loved it. Honestly, the only thing that was a show-stopper for me was the incompatibility with Foxmarks, which I use to sync my bookmarks across multiple computers. Version 2.0 of Flock is supposed to have the same performance improvements as Firefox 3. I just have to cross my fingers and hope the Foxmarks developers release a version that works on it.

Update: After much fussing around, I finally gave up on Firefox 3 (for now).  The NewTabURL add-on just doesn’t work properly, and doing without the other incompatible add-ons isn’t much fun.  I went back to version 2 and will give it some time until the add-ons are updated.  Oh, well…