OutFoxed

If you run Firefox as your main browser, you probably know that Firefox 3 went live earlier this week. If you haven't upgraded yet, take my considered advice: Don't!

I looked over the new features on the Firefox website this morning, and it looked good, so I downloaded and installed it. Les than two hours later, I was downgrading back to 2.0.0.14 (which, fortunately, I was able to locate on their support site, since the FF3 install overwrites FF2). Why?

1. In that under-two-hour span, FF3 crashed at least eight times (I didn't think to keep track until it was too late). It crashed while I was on the Firefox site, looking for add-ons and searching the support pages; it crashed on a blog that I access daily; it crashed after I installed a new theme; it crashed when I tried to uninstall the theme; it crashed on startup. (I had to start in Safe Mode to get rid of that theme.)
2. Three quarters of my extensions (and I have a lot of them) were not compatible with FF3. Of those, only three had new, compatible versions.
3. My favorite theme is not compatible with FF3, and the IMO the default theme sucks. It's dark (grey and black), and very hard to read the favorites toolbar, which displayed no favicons, just text.
   
4. A new version of my theme is available. Unfortunately it seemed to be even more crash-prone than the default (see #1). Oh, and there was no vertical scrollbar. Pretty inconvenient to navigate without that.
   
5. When I checked out the missing scrollbar issue in the Mozilla Knowledge Base, I found that this is a known issue for "certain themes" in Mac OS X. The solution? Go back to the default theme. According to one post on the Firefox support forum, a Mac user tried a number of themes and none of them displayed a scrollbar.
6. The support forum was absolutely crammed with posts clamoring for the location of the 2.0.0.14 download so they could go back to a browser that works. They were running XP, Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux. Across the board, the opinion was that FF3 sucks.
   

I should know better than to install an upgrade so soon; it's very uncharacteristic of me. (Heck, I stuck with OS 9.2 until shortly before 10.4 came out.) But I've had such good luck in the past with Firefox, I just never anticipated this piece of crap.