I heard about FireFox 3 off G4 Tech TV the other day. Mozilla tried to set a world record for most downloads of a new release software in one day. Regardless if they broke the record or not, I will be reviewing what I feel is the worst FireFox release so far. Keep in mind, this is the Macintosh version, so for you Windows lovers, maybe your release is better, quite frankly I don’t care, because I will be reviewing Internet Explorer 8 next.

Let me begin with the first reactions I had when I started up FF3. When I opened it, i checked to make sure it was FireFox, and not Safari 4, because the layout and colour scheme is exactly like Safari. They dropped the colour from the browser, and made it all grey and black. Once I got past the cloned theme, I tried to work with eBay.ca and list some items. FireFox doesn’t seem to update the pages when you access a drop down menu. For example, I needed to select the shipping information in ebay, but every time I did that, the page would not refresh to show the new options. This meant I had to force the page to show that information, by continuing, and getting an error from eBay saying I didn’t fill everything out.

This issue is not an eBay issue, as some of you may have assumed. I was able to do the same operation on Safari 3 with the proper page updates that were required to list items properly. This is definately an issue either with eBay not supporting FF3, or FF3 not working as intended. At the moment, it is impossible to list items properly with FF3 in eBay, and I would assume it will give the same issue in similar situations. 

 

Issue 2 is again a design flaw. Besides the shitty theme design, Mozilla has added some stupid sort of finder code to the address bar. When I type in an address, I want it to autofill the address with whatever is in it’s history, I do not however want every single page I’ve been to in the past 3 years to show up instead. FF3 will show you pages, websites, bookmarks, and probably even google maps locations for anything you type in. If I start to type in www.facebook.com, I want to push the down key and hit enter, and end up at www.facebook.com, not the last 25 million pages on facebook I went to last. I understand the reason for having such a feature, but if I want to search for facebook in my history, I will do so by going into my history.

So far, FireFox 3 has some flaws, but then again, what doesn’t these days. I won’t be using it unless I need to double-log my facebook accounts, and I choose to keep my PC in standby. I’m hoping Mozilla just released it quickly so they could get it out before Safar 4 or IE8. I’d like to see some things get fixed, and maybe I’ll use it at some point. Safari is still my choice at the moment.