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Firefox: No longer the gold standard of awesomeness?

I have been having some definite problems since upgrading to Firefox 3. The new address bar feature is frustrating — at least on my computer, it means that I effectively can’t type an address in “real time.” I also experience random hang-ups, seemingly requiring me to click the window repeatedly in order to get Firefox’s attention. Pages with Flash embedded are especially problematic and sometimes crash the browser. (I also hate that when I’m using the scroll wheel on my mouse, it stops scrolling if the cursor enters into an embedded Flash element.)

In my experience, Firefox used to be basically bulletproof, and the latest “upgrade” has reduced it to Microsoft-esque levels of reliability. I should probably just downgrade.

UPDATE: I have decided to downgrade, and so far it seems like it was a good idea. Readers wishing to follow my example can begin here.

November 17, 2008 - Posted by Adam Kotsko | boredom | | 8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. Ditto on all these problems. The address autocomplete is handy but it’s a real pain on my dying computer. Everything BBC related (video, radio) basically screws up or ends up on a random bit of the screen.

    Oddly downgrading hadn’t occurred to me, even though I never had any problems with Firefox 2. Your post having just planted the idea in my head, somehow I still have a fear of going backwards that just won’t let me.

    Comment by RobDP | November 17, 2008

  2. I hate the new address bar. For some reason, on a particular site I visit, it constantly tries to send me to a particular article (that I only read twice) rather than the homepage (which I visit daily). Why!?

    Comment by The Girl | November 17, 2008

  4. Yes, the order of suggested completions seems to be totally random.

    I did just downgrade, and it appears to be working fine, though not completely flawlessly. One annoying thing is that it apparently lost all my cookies in the process, but that is easy enough to fix in the course of normal browsing. It also feels noticeably faster.

    Comment by Adam Kotsko | November 17, 2008

  5. Question – what kind of addons do you have? I know that I’ve had trouble with adblock and noscript playing nicely when it comes to flash, for instance.

    Comment by anonyous coward | November 17, 2008

  6. I have had no problems whatsoever. There has been some slowness, but I attribute it to my connection. Perhaps it’s because I’m using Vista?

    Comment by phil | November 17, 2008

  7. 1. You can turn the ‘Awesome Bar’ off with a bit of a tweak that take about five seconds to do. http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/tutorials/0,1000002006,39436031,00.htm
    2. I’ve gotta say, I’ve not encountered these problems, and the nighty builds with the new javascript rendering engine are insanely fast.

    Comment by Alex | November 18, 2008

  8. The thing that drives me nuts is the Flash bug. I can’t get Flash stuff to play, almost ever, in Firefox anymore, with limited exceptions.

    Comment by strasmangelo jones | November 18, 2008


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