Firefox 3: Two Steps Back
I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) this weekend. So far my first experience with Firefox 3 hasn't been great.
First the minor issue: When I launched FF3, my fonts were messed up. Some pages looked normal, others had ugly huge fonts. Maybe the big fonts are a problem with Ubuntu's Freetype config. Maybe it's a problem with the nVidia drivers. I don't know. Thankfully, I found a workaround. In Firefox about:config set layout.css.dpi to 96. (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=706788&page=2)
Now my bigger gripe: I don't like the new rich urlbar. Back in FF2, I could open most of my favorite sites in 4 keystrokes or less. By increasing the amount of data the new urlbar searches, the Firefox devs have decreased the unique identifiers for each link. So far, I haven't found a fix. It isn't just the slow loading or the giant waste of space, the most important detail is the sorting algorithm. I know abou the oldbar plugin, unfortunately it's only a cosmetic fix because it doesn't include the old FF2 sorting.
Hopefully I'll find reasons to like FF3, but for now it feels like Firefox has taken two steps back.