Over the past week or two, I’d been noticing that my install of Mozilla Firefox had been slowing down dramatically. It finally got to a point yesterday where I got tired of it hanging on my machine, and decided to do something about it. I didn’t feel like going over to Internet Explorer, nor did I feel like biting the bullet and installing Safari. Then I remembered that Mozilla had already released Release Candidate 1 of Firefox 3.0, so I decided to give that a shot.
Amusingly enough, when it installed and checked plugins for the first time, one of the plugins it said it had an issue with was the AVG Free 8.0 safe site scanner. I had forgotten that was installed, and could very well have been the cause of Firefox’s previous slowdown. Ah, well…
So, the question now is what I think of Firefox 3.0. For the most part, based on the few hours of experience I’ve had with it, it seems to be snappy and work relatively well. The one irritating change that I’ve noticed is how the drop-down address bar works. It doesn’t have the same history I had before. In fact, I’m not sure what it has; it seemed to be mostly random pages I’d visited. The problem is that instead of bookmarking pages that were my favorites, I’d just go to them on my drop down address bar and reserve the bookmarks toolbar for RSS feeds. I’ve decided to go ahead and bookmark my favorite pages and just get to them that way. I really should have done it sooner, as the bookmark method definitely makes it easier to migrate in case I need to reload this machine or in case I want to go ahead and put these on my Portable Firefox install.
All in all, I haven’t had any issues, and it seems to be a little bit faster. We’ll see how it goes in the long run.