Comments on: The Firefox Catch-22, Will Firefox 3 Help?

By: Firefox 3: Impressions, Issues, and Verdict | TechConsumer

Firefox 3: Impressions, Issues, and Verdict | TechConsumer — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:32:39 +0000

[...] of complications. As I’ve discussed before, sure enough, my major issues revolved around the Firefox catch-22: [...]

By: I’ve Given Up on Digg & Delicious But Am Hooked on Reddit | TechConsumer

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:36:13 +0000

[...] there you have it. For my needs, I find bookmarking is still best handled by my browser of choice while social news and content discovery is best handled by Reddit. What do you use for bookmarking [...]

By: I Bought My First Firefox Extension Today | TechConsumer

I Bought My First Firefox Extension Today | TechConsumer — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:30:49 +0000

[...] extension: whether or not it will work with Firefox 3. As I’ve mentioned before, Firefox 2 is my browser of choice despite the at least weekly lock ups and slow downs due to memory leaks. The reason being that I [...]

By: Paul Ellis

Paul Ellis — Mon, 26 May 2008 23:37:23 +0000

I can’t remember which ones didn’t work me, but my problem was particularly with one plugin, Google Bookmarks Sync. I have my bookmarks sync’d across my laptop, desktop, and my wife’s laptop. Due to the dramatic changes in the bookmark system pretty much every bookmark extension is broken.

By: Bob Caswell

Bob Caswell — Mon, 26 May 2008 20:40:59 +0000

To be honest, I can’t remember which ones were beta and which ones weren’t. But like you mentioned, Paul, “approachable and maintainable” doesn’t include micromanaging extensions constantly.

I’m going to give FF3 a try when it officially comes out (like I did with FF2). But depending on which extensions work / don’t work, I might go back to FF2 until FF3 is ready for prime time.

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 26 May 2008 20:17:04 +0000

None of the extension I use are “betas”. They are the ones that were not disabled. As the betas progressed, some of these extension were broken, and later updated them selves. Several of the themes went through some fast update cycles (over the course of 2 or 3 days); but I expect that,

After all, if you see a bug “crawling” out of your code; get a flyswatter.

By: Paul Ellis

Paul Ellis — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:40:27 +0000

Are any of the extensions you are using in that list the “beta” ones? Last time I tried to run FF3 I had to find a bunch of beta extensions; it couldn’t just upgrade the current ones I had installed. If Mozilla really wants FF to go beyond its current user base it has to make extensions more approachable and maintainable for “average” users.

If you look at Internet Explorer you’ll find that add-ons for IE6 still work in the IE8 beta.

By: Bob Caswell

Bob Caswell — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:09:38 +0000

Bob,

That’s not a bad list, but last I checked, more than half of the ones I use still don’t work with FF3. We’ll see where things are with the “official” release next month…

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 26 May 2008 13:40:11 +0000

I have been using FF3 betas since they became available in November; in fact, this reply is being created using the RC1 version of FF3.

I have the following extensions installed and they work:

Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus Element Hider, Download Statusbar, Down Them All, Extended Cookie manager, No Script, PDF download, Splaah, Toolbar buttons, US English dictionary and Web of Trust.

These themes are installed and are compatible with the RC1 version:

Aeon Big, Aeon Clouds, Aeon Colors, Aeon Jumbo, Classic Compact (I use it daily), Default 3.0, HiVis, HiVis Large, Metal Lion – Andeomeda, Microfox, NASA Night Launch (BTW – congrats to those involved with the Phoenix lander), Nautipolis, Pitch Dark, W3V8 and Walnut.

The thought of going back to FF2 never entered my mind. I have heard chatter about FF4, rumored to be based on Mozilla 2 (Gecko 2.0), being “further integrated into the computer and the internet. I am curious to see where that will go.