Baumblog EST 1968 - A blog for the Baumbachs who originated in Syracuse, NY

If you have even a tiny bit of geek blood in your veins, you know that Firefox 3 has been recently released. If you were one of the lucky ones who threw caution out the window and installed the initial release of FF3, you already know what I'm about to tell you:

Don't get me wrong--the feature changes are pretty cool. But, and this is a bigger but than my own derreire, FF3 harkens back to the days of running Windows 3.0 in terms of crashing. For those of you who don't remember those golden days of Windows, let's just say Win3.0 brought application crashing to level of an art. FF3 is very retro in that regard.

Already installed it? You might want to downgrade. If you keep it, well, stay away from Flash stuff. I know, easy to do, what with it being all over the web these days. It seems it really doesn't much care for Flash...or gets so excited about Flash, it has to max the cpu (or at least one of them, if you have multiple CPUs) infinitely.

For those of you still running FF2, stay there. Only run IE? How's Back Orifice treating you?

Marc said about 2 hours later

Well I just installed it on Windows Vista. The ultimate combination possibly? I'll let you guys know.
Steve said about 4 hours later

Marc, you might want to keep a fire extinguisher near your computer with that combination...
GJ said about 19 hours later

Nah, that's only if you play Bioshock on it.
Geoff said about 20 hours later

I can confirm that FF3 blows, both visually and performance wise. Thank you Microzilla.
GJ said about 21 hours later

The awesome bar is pretty cool, though. IMHO, of course.
Geoff said about 23 hours later

eh...it's a little much I think. Time will tell I guess. Perhaps if FF didn't fall asleep at the wheel every 5 minutes I wouldn't be so hostile towards the "good" stuff....
GJ said 1 day later

A little much would be highlighting it with Las Vegas lights. :)
Marc said 1 day later

So far I've been running fine, no CPU spikes, 3-4 tabs open at all times and I haven't really closed the browser down. I will say I started a download that was about 150MB that when I left and came back to, it was apparently completed, but only 10MB, but I can't blame firefox without watching it.

I will agree with Geoff the look of Firefox 3 is rather ugly (On Windows, on Mac OS X it looks fantastic). It reminds me of a mixture of the old Linux UIs combined with IE7, and we all know two wrongs don't make a right.
GJ said 1 day later

I'm going back to Netscape, dammit.
Marc said 3 days later

I'm up to 4 crashes with relatively limited use. There certainly is something hokey with this new version. I would wait for 3.1 or 3.0.1, whichever they name the next version.