Two months ago on March 11th I announced I would be Making the Switch to Fx 3.0. I did download and install Firefox 3 a couple weeks ago. However, I had not done much with it up until this weekend. Part of this was because I was having issues trying to get my bookmarks over from Firefox 2. The issue had nothing to do with the inability of Firefox 3 to import my Firefox 2 bookmarks. Rather it was I could not locate my Firefox 2 bookmarks within my profile folder. Turns out the profile folder path is a little different in Windows Vista than it is in Windows XP. I was not looking in the roaming profiles folder:
Once I was able to locate my bookmarks and get them imported, the next step was to get my extensions installed. This is when I noticed the add-ons user-interface (UI) is a little different in Firefox 3:
The Get Add-ons option allows you to search and install add-ons right from the add-ons UI instead of clicking a link to be taken to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). On my Firefox 2 profile I had 28 extensions installed with 1 (Talkback) disabled. I have weeded that number down to 15 extensions on my Firefox 3 profile:
- Abduction! 2.019
- Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4
- Brief 1.2b2 (available from developer’s site only)
- ChromEdit Plus 2.7.2
- CoLT 2.4.0
- Download Statusbar 0.9.6.1
- Flashblock 1.5.5
- FoxyTunes 3.0.1 (available from developer’s site only)
- Greasemonkey 0.7.20080121.0
- Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.2
- PDF Download 1.0.1.1
- SearchLoad Options 0.5
- Toolbar Buttons 0.5.0.4
- Update Channel Selector 1.0.3
- WeatherBug 2.0.0.3
Both FoxyTunes and Brief I was able to do a ‘force install’ via the Nightly Tester Tools, but they would not function. While FoxyTunes was not too big of deal, Brief was the ‘make it or break it’ for me to switch over to Firefox 3.0b5 as my default browser. FoxyTunes notified me as soon as I restarted that there was a ‘newer version’ available and it gave a link to follow to the developer’s site. With Brief I ended up going to the developer’s site and found they had just put out a new version for the Firefox 3.0b5 release.
I have noticed an increase in performance, but some of that may be attributed to running a fresh and slim profile. Haven’t really explored much of the new features other than the AMO integration into the add-ons UI. Also noticed the green address bar on sites with high level SSL Certificates. I will post more as I discover more features, annoyances (the new auto-complete address bar is starting to become one) and anything else with Firefox 3.
If you’ll use the Foxmarks extension, you won’t ever have to worry about your bookmarks again. With Foxmarks, I’m able to access my bookmarks wherever I go, provided Firefox is installed (simply a matter of installing the Foxmarks extension). And, before you say that Firefox 3 beta 5 doesn’t support Foxmarks, there is a beta version of Foxmarks available that does support FX3b5.
where is download link