Making the switch

So a few days ago fiefox-3 was pulled in during the regular system updates, and after a few hours of using it I must say: it sucks even more than firefox-2, which IMHO was already a regression from earlier versions. Actually I think that since they changed the name from phoenix [i]my[/i] user experience has gotten worse with each new version. Now I have to admit I’m probably not a typical user, so firefox-3 might be an improvement for the majority, but I’m really fed up with it.
As neither konqueror (kde-centric) nor opera (binary-only) are alternatives for me I looked out for other broswers out there today and noticed Arora, a new qt-webkit based browser and decided to try it out. And I must say I really like it so far, though I’ve only used it for a few hours so far. It feels a lot like older firefox versions, just without much of the “user-friendly” bloat they’ve added over time (e.g. the new fancy addressbar in firefox-3). It’s still a very early version, so obviously it’s lacking some features (like no flash support, though I consider that more as a feature :>) and probably has a few bugs, but at the moment I like it (much) better than what has become of firefox.

3 thoughts on “Making the switch”

  1. btw you can turn off that address bar. What is it exactly that you dislike about Firefox 3? There might be about:config ways to turn it off or extensions to do the same.

  2. It’s not just one or two things but many little issues. E.g. in firefox-2 they moved the close button for tabs from the right side of the tabbar onto the active tab which caused me some grieve as on many sites I used to open a lot of tabs up front (one for each article/post), and let the mouse cursor sit in that one place to close them one after the other, that didn’t work anymore after the change. Or that not all tabs were displayed anymore and you had to use the dropdown box/sliders to switch back and forth. Also I experienced major performance issues on some sites I visit frequently (only on linux though, so system-specific and probably hard to analyze). And with firefox-3 there were also some new render issues.
    As for configuration/extensions, that only works to a certain degree, when it gets too much you’ll have to consider a more drastic change.

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