I’ve been using the new Firefox 3.0 on a couple of our computers here.  As with any upgrade, there are new “features” (and I use the term loosely) that work nicely, whereas others are either broken or do not work as they did in earlier versions.  What has changed, and what have I done to fix them?

The biggest improvement in Firefox 3.0 is speed.  The memory leak issue has apparently been fixed.  With that, pages no longer have that laggy response time they had in the past.  So, I’m not typing here at the Corner and waiting five seconds for half a line of text to catch up with me.  I have at least 20 tabs open in one window as I write this, and half a dozen tabs in another window, and speed is still good.  FF2 would have been choking after only a few hours.

Feature-wise, the two versions are nearly the same.  A couple of new features or changes, though, I found to be annoying.  To wit:

Awesome Bar: this “improvement” was supposed to make your address bar easier to navigate. Each site now has two lines–one is a page title, where the second is the URL.  That feature was annoying to me, a heavy FF user, so it had to go.  In short, the Awesome Bar…wasn’t.  The cure for that was a new plugin that returns most of the functionality of the address bar in earlier FF versions.  Download the addon here:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227 .

Automatic Download Virus Scanning: I already have a virus scanner and manually scan all downloaded files.  I don’t need the delay in FF, as most files I download are trusted.  By typing about:config in the address bar, you can search for browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone .  Set it to false, and you’re good to go.

Yellow Address Bar on Secure Sites: when you visited a secure site in FF2, your address bar turned yellow.  It was great for peripheral vision–you could see it out of the corner of your eye while browsing and be assured your session was secure.  This is gone in FF3.  To restore, edit your userChrome.css file by adding the following line:

#urlbar[level] .autocomplete-textbox-container { background-color: #FFFFB7 !important; }

Alt+ Key Behavior: There is not yet a fix for the broken ALT-key behavior.  In FF2, Mozilla decided we should use ALT+SHIFT+S when sites were coded for ALT+S, for example.  There is a thread at the Mozilla support forum, but no fixes are posted yet:

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=fi&comments_parentId=68727&forumId=1

Watch this article, as I’ll be posting more FF3 tips and tricks here.