Firefox 3 - So Close, Yet So Annoying

By Cyrris

In stark contrast to my usual fanatical following of each previous version, I decided not to bother going near any of the beta releases for Firefox 3 which have been successively released over the past few months. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago, with the unveiling of Release Candidate 1, that I bit the bullet and gave it a go. While the reviews I have read around the web have given it glowing praise so far, I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed.

The best analogy I can think of is the car I drive. Just a few months ago I was driving a 15 year old bomb. All sorts of things were wrong with it, and it was generally not a pleasant driving experience. Now I have a brand new automobile. Being new, it has everything I could possibly want in a car, and more. What this means though, is that the few niggling bugs which do exist (a couple of rattles, a scratch or two, and a slightly misaligned dash panel) drive me absolutely insane. It’s so close to being perfect, but just not quite there because of some really stupid minor issues.

This is why Firefox 3 RC1 makes me so frustrated, and unfortunately very few of the issues appear to be fixable before the full release.

The first and most glaring problem I have is the default theme. Now, this issue is a carry-over from Firefox 2, which also had a theme that I couldn’t stand. Thankfully the theme from Firefox 1.5 was made available and I have been using it ever since, but it concerns me that yet again, a new release has taken another step backwards in the looks department. I understand there is a need for an integrated look across the various platforms, and I can see how that would make it harder to do whilst also keeping some similarities across them all. I also understand that big strides have been made particularly on the Mac for integration. Honestly though, IE7, Opera and Safari all look much, much nicer. If the keyhole buttons were considered too ugly for Vista then I can’t fathom why they were deemed acceptable for Firefox. -5 points. Subjective, I know.

No piece on Firefox 3 would be complete without the not-officially-named “Awesome Bar”. This is a term which a few Mozillans have given to the new functionality present in the address bar for Firefox 3. No longer do you need to type the start of an address to have similar things pop up for you - now you can type any words at all. The autocomplete will then match what you type to both the URL and page title of the sites in your history, and match them up intelligently according to your previous browsing habits. While overall it is a big plus, a couple of niggles are present. Most importantly, stop words need to be handled better. When I typed in “for” I was first greeted with “Slashdot: News for nerds…” when I was trying to get to some forums instead. Thankfully it has since remembered my choices and it’s no longer the first suggestion. These unimportant words need to be given a much lower priority. Secondly, the suggested addresses and their favicons make terrible use of space, and add to the already serious clutter problem. When the last beta release was stealthily installed on my mothers computer, she was convinced that she had been infected with adware because of it. +5 points but -1 for the implementation shortfalls.

The clutter problem is one which I have been keeping a keen eye on ever since the now ubiquitous RSS/Feed icon was first put inside Firefox’s address bar. Now in Firefox 3, as well as the clutter added from the Awesome Bar, we have the feed icon, the favourites star, and 3 different kinds of favicon underlays depending on the security level of the site you are visiting. No longer does the address bar turn yellow on SSL encrypted sites - the left-most part now just turns blue. And for sites with properly verified certificates, they’ll turn green and become extra large. It is a surprising move since they only just recently got IE and Opera on board with the yellow SSL cue, and I am not sure if this is a particularly good solution. -1 for the address bar clutter, but I’ll abstain from judgement on the security colourings for now.

The downloads manager has seen substantial change. While the additional features are mostly welcome, the price paid for them has been the amazing simplicity which the download manager provided back in Firefox 1 and 2. No longer are the pause/resume options presented by easy to read text links. Now they are tiny white icons - they don’t save much space, they don’t look better, and they don’t make it easier to use. The file icons and file names are too large, and cause the entire window to feel cluttered by a lack of padding. Finally, the easy button that takes you to your regular downloads folder has been removed, and replaced by a completely useless search field. Why anyone would need to search through their downloads is beyond me, if you have a button that goes straight to that folder anyway. +1 for the extra features, nothing more.

Then we come to the list of smaller changes.

• The options window. Those menu icons across the top? They’re not evenly spaced. Upon highlighting them, the button sizes are all different. Does it look unprofessional? Yes. -1
• The new password manager dialogue. It now pops a short while later, so you can first see if your login was successful before being asked whether or not you want Firefox to remember it. +1
• Once again they’ve left the “duplicate tab” menu item off the list, and only doable as an extension. -1
• Luckily for Mozilla, getting that extension (and others) will be a much simpler process, with the new built-in add-on finder. +2 points
• Adding tags to bookmarks increases clutter and I cannot think of a more useless feature to have added. -1
• Full-screen zoom. Something I know a few people have been waiting a very long time for. +1 point.

After that exhaustive analysis, the list comes out with an overall score of 1. Impressive.

Lastly, we come to the less noticable improvements. Memory usage has been slashed, speed has been boosted, and rendering improvements are all around the place. One might argue that these are in fact the most important improvements in the browser, and I couldn’t really disagree with you. However for the average user they are among the least important, and let’s face it, Firefox has already won over all the web fanatics out there. The challenge is getting everyone else. Nevertheless, all of these improvements can’t go ignored (by me at least), so they get +10 points. I would have given them +50, but apparently the bug which causes extremely slow smooth-scrolling on fixed backgrounds won’t be fixed in Firefox 3. That’s a shame, as I’ve been waiting for that one to be fixed for years.

In conclusion, I’m being a bit of a bastard. Of course I can’t just add up the points above and claim a score for the program, because there are many more minor tweaks which I just don’t care to really look at and try out. I also don’t care to try it out on other platforms. Firefox is staying ahead of the game, but it seems that increased competition from the likes of Microsoft, Opera and Apple have caused Mozilla to rush through their latest Firefox features without the usual polish. So much work has gone under the hood of Firefox 3 that to appreciate all that it offers, you’d have to be in the business of making websites. For the average joe, the improvements are numerous, but it could be so much better. Knowing this makes me grind my teeth.

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