We all know about Firefox 2’s ghastly fallbacks. The memory hogging, CPU sucking days were supposed to be over with the release of the new Firefox 3 browser, right? Or so they said…
I’ll be the first to admit, (or rather, the 409,718th to admit) that the RC1 and RC2 “pre-release” versions of the Firefox 3 browser were in fact much faster, much more memory efficient, and, in general, offered a more enjoyable browsing experience than their predecessors.
However, today Mozilla launched the “Official” release of the Firefox 3 browser, which I downloaded and installed about 2 hours ago. And, as you may have guessed, the browser is once again up to it’s old shenanigans! So, slow, so, so slow. So much RAM being wasted! (On what?)
In sales, they call this “bait and switch”. They “bait” you with one product whilst boasting it’s extravagant features, then, once you’re hooked, they “switch” it with an inferior product. In most countries, the practice is completely ILLEGAL! Companies found guilty would have to pay back the consumers. However, we did not have to purchase this browser, it was free. But that doesn’t mean it comes with out a hefty price: Your Time (and your electricity to push your now severely overworked CPU).
There are also quite a few bugs that I’ve noticed. Such as, when trying to add a bookmark by dragging the favicon into the bookmark bar’s folder, there are some sub menu tiers that cannot be accessed. And pressing Control-D to bookmark doesn’t remember the last folder you added a bookmark to (unless you added it in one certain way, via the CTRL-D dialogue box). I even emailed these bugs to Mozilla, but they released the new version without fixing them for some reason.
So, to me, the new version is worthless. The result: I will be re-installing FF2 as soon as I get the chance.
If you haven’t done so yet, please do not bother upgrading to the new browser.
