A user’s opinion of Firefox 3 Beta 5

Peng’s made it quite clear how he feels about Firefox 3, but he’s a geek and a bit of a techie so I wanted to post my feelings about it, simply from the standpoint of a user who got it when she upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy.

First off, I’m glad Peng had me back up my profile before I fired up Firefox 3. If I hadn’t I would have been really pissed that I couldn’t use that profile in Firefox 2 anymore. Peng tried to explain to me why the profile changed so much but my eyes just glazed over. I do know that many of my favorite extensions and themes don’t work in Firefox 3, but since it’s not even a release candidate yet I knew that was going to happen.

I really like how much faster Firefox 3 is than Firefox 2. I don’t know what the developers did but I now understand why I saw so many people poo-pooing the idea of staying with Firefox 2 because the new version is so much faster. I also like being able to type in the title of a page I had visited recently or that I had bookmarked and being able to get to it without hunting through my history or bookmarks menu. Peng showed me an article last night on Planet Mozilla about something I hadn’t realized I could do now.

I also like how when you drag a link to a tab the new tab gets the focus so you can make sure where the link will open. This is so cool I have to wonder why didn’t they have this sooner?

Turning the coin over…

The problem is that there is a flip side to the coin that negates a lot of the goodness in Firefox 3. I visit a lot of sites, especially since Peng made me a page with some of my favorite destinations on it like he uses for his startup page. When I go to some sites to read a new article the text is kind of small so I use that wonderful Firefox trick of hitting Ctrl-+ to zoom the text. Unfortunately the entire page is zoomed, images and all, so I now have to drag the horizontal scroll bar back and forth. WTF??? I did see that I could zoom just the text, which is a little better, but I was pretty pissed off when I first went to zoom the text and the entire page got zoomed. Who in the world decided that the new behavior would be the default rather than the old way? I don’t care how many people asked for it, if you change a behavior your old users are going to expect the old behavior to be there with an option to change in Preferences (not on the View menu, by the way). And in case any dev reads this, you need to make it easier to discover how to zoom just the text. That took me way too long to find.

There’s another problem with how Firefox zooms. I’m going to a bunch of different sites and I hate closing and reopening tabs so I just reuse the ones I have open. Except when I zoom into the text a little because the font is so small (I hate setting the minimum font size in the prefs because it changes how pages get laid out too often) and visit another site I have to reset the zoom level. HUH???One thing I love about Firefox is that not only can I have a bunch of tabs that I can reuse just by dragging a new link to the tab and if I have the page in that tab zoomed the new link will also have the text zoomed. Nope. Not any more.

I also miss having the backward and forward histories separate. I know the keyhole removed the space for one of the dropdown arrows, and it only took a little time to get used to how they list the history now, but I hate the length of the list now if I’m in the middle of the history listing. I don’t want to have to look to find the bolded page to know where I am, I want to simply work my way down the list like I’ve always been able to do.

Speaking of the Keyhole

Being a Linux user I don’t get the keyhole with the back button larger than the forward button, although I do get the layout of the keyhole. Who decided the back button needs to be bigger? The Back button is on the left, the Next button is on the right. Hello? Even an eight-year-old knows that? I’ve seen that the Back button is bigger because “it’s important.” You know what I did when I first heard that? I laughed. That’s the kind of logic I expect from some high priced design firm that can’t bare to admit that they did it to be able to charge you more for the change. If that’s the case here maybe Mozilla has too much money sitting around. IMO it’s not just ugly it’s fugly and reeks of trying to earn a spot at the cool kid’s table.

Granted, I’m not some twenty-something that just came out of college and loves to waste time on MySpace, Facebook and all those other “cool Web 2.0″ sites. I’m closer to 40 than 30 and I decided years ago I don’t give a damn about being “cool.” I’d rather just be me. And as far as MySpace goes, am I the only one who thinks it’s the newest version of the old GeoCities sites where people who really don’t know much about design and layout create sites that they think are cool because of all the crap you can put on it? Even on a high speed connection who above 25 wants to wait for all the videos and music and glittery animations to load? (Don’t get me started on sites that play music without asking if you want to hear it first.) Yes, I know the high school and college students love them, but in case you notice most of us aren’t that young anymore and if it takes more than five or ten seconds to load a web page on our nice high speed connection we go to the next site we were planning on checking out. I’m sorry, time’s up. But thanks for playing our little game.

As I look at Firefox 3 I see an almost desperate attempt at capturing two groups of people: The “cool kids” who have to use the same things their 50-150 co-called friends on the social networking sites use, and the users who are so clueless that it’s surprising they can turn on their computer. As far as the “cool kids” go, why can’t they just use something like Flock that’s Firefox with extra goodies on top of it to make the cool kids happy and leave Firefox pretty basic so we can customize it as little or as much as we want. I thought that was the idea behind add-ons in the first place.

What about the noobs? They need someone to sit down and show them what’s possible and what isn’t, then let them explore. Make sure there’s a nice help file explaining how to do things and make sure it’s easy to remember and find again. But for crying out loud why does the default Firefox have to get dumbed down so the IE idiots can use it? Let the page you see when you fire up Firefox for the first time have the info kind of like it does now, but put the page in the bookmarks so people new to Firefox can get to the info again. I’m smart enough to know that Firefox is more secure than IE and why I don’t want to use IE (even before Peng got me to switch to Linux), but I’m feeling Firefox (and IE, I assume) is getting so “new user friendly” that people who have used Firefox for a while now have to relearn how to use their favorite browser so the less technically inclined have something that even they can use.

Sorry Mozilla, Firefox was wonderful for a while. Now it’s gotten faster but treats me like I’m an idiot. And in case you didn’t notice I’m smart enough to not use that security risk called Windows on my home PC. I, like Peng, am looking for a browser that supports Linux, accepts add-ons, and doesn’t treat me like I’m an idot.