I upgraded to Firefox 3.0 RC1 last weekend. That lasted about 36 hours… I didn’t really care for the new UI enhancements, and there’s no way to disable many of them.
* Who’s idea was it to fundamentally alter the location bar’s behavior? Instead of working like an address bar “auto-complete” it searches all of the meta-data related to the URL: address, page title, keywords, etc. This is totally worthless to me, a bit distracting, and a major shift in the way I’m used to working. Here’s someone else with the same complaint: Awesome bar still a piece of junk!
* What happened to the “forward history” pull-down menu? I never realized I used that feature until it went missing in Firefox 3.
* What’s with the RSS feed and glowing star icon in the location bar? Who cares? Get rid of it!
* I don’t like the design of the new downloads window. Yes, it’s more compact but no where near as aesthetically pleasing.
* I don’t like the highlight delay when mousing over tabs. I want instantaneous feedback, and the 0.5s delay in there when mousing over a tab is distracting when your eye isn’t immediately over it. Again, it’s one of these things I never realized I did with Firefox, but I’ll frequently switch tabs using the mouse without even looking directly at the tab, and that slight delay impedes my ability to do that.
In the end, the location bar alteration was the deal breaker, I don’t have the patience to adjust to it at the moment. It seems like the kind of thing that needs to pop-up when you hit ctrl-space, or at the very least you need to be able to disable it and get the old behavior back.
I was impressed by one feature of Firefox 3 however: You can upgrade to 3.0, uninstall completely, reinstall 2.0 and retain your bookmarks and settings! Woo-hoo! That’s quality software.