ozzmosis.com
Fri, 15 Feb 2008
13:10 - Using Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Beta 3
Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 has just
been released so I thought I'd upgrade from Beta 2 and see what's
changed. I wasn't expecting any real issues, so when things got
painful I decided to document what I did make the pain go away.
The good news is the NoScript, Adblock Plus and (I think) PDF Download extensions seem to work fine. The bad news is Beta 3 broke some other things:
The 'New Tab' and 'Home' icon on the Navigation toolbar disappeared. I went to 'Customize Toolbar' and restored it back to the defaults, then added the 'New Tab' icon back, but couldn't figure out how to get the 'Home' icon back. After some guesswork I discovered you have to enable the Bookmarks toolbar, then go back into the 'Customize Toolbar' dialog, then drag the 'Home' icon to the Navigation Toolbar. After all this, the toolbar were back to how I wanted them. Except now, the Back/Forward page button now has a single tiny down arrow that lists the pages you've visited, instead of two separate down arrows (one for back, one for forward) like in previous versions. After a bit of consideration, that might not be so bad, although the down arrow is still very small. Small enough that it may not be noticed by the casual user.
The address bar (URL bar) now uses a richlistbox widget, also known as the "awesome bar", used for searching your URL history. I think it's sluggish and don't like the way it looks. In 3.0 Beta 2 you could turn it off in about:config by setting browser.urlbar.richResults to False. In Beta 3, this setting no longer supported and has no effect. To go back to the old widget you now have to use the Oldbar extension, but as of writing it only supports versions of Firefox up to 3.0b3pre. To force Beta 3 to install the Oldbar extension I had to set extensions.checkCompatibility to False in about:config. To actually enable to extensions I installed the Nightly Tester Tools extension. I then went to the Add-ons list, right clicked on the Oldbar extension and selected 'Make compatible', and restarted Firefox.
At this point I reinstalled the AutoCopy, Paste and Go 2 and Popup ALT Attributes extensions. I'd been previously using these with Firefox 2.0. They seem to work OK in Firefox 3.0 Beta 3.
Update: Setting "extensions.checkUpdateSecurity" to False in about:config may be required for some old extensions to work around the "does not provide secure updates" error.
Update #2: There are some odd rendering issues with Firefox 3.0 beta 3 (which may have also been present in beta 2). See this screenshot, for example.
Update #3: I think the above font rendering problem was caused by some screwy fonts and not Firefox. It seems to have gone away since I deleted a bunch of fonts, anyway.
category: /
The good news is the NoScript, Adblock Plus and (I think) PDF Download extensions seem to work fine. The bad news is Beta 3 broke some other things:
The 'New Tab' and 'Home' icon on the Navigation toolbar disappeared. I went to 'Customize Toolbar' and restored it back to the defaults, then added the 'New Tab' icon back, but couldn't figure out how to get the 'Home' icon back. After some guesswork I discovered you have to enable the Bookmarks toolbar, then go back into the 'Customize Toolbar' dialog, then drag the 'Home' icon to the Navigation Toolbar. After all this, the toolbar were back to how I wanted them. Except now, the Back/Forward page button now has a single tiny down arrow that lists the pages you've visited, instead of two separate down arrows (one for back, one for forward) like in previous versions. After a bit of consideration, that might not be so bad, although the down arrow is still very small. Small enough that it may not be noticed by the casual user.
The address bar (URL bar) now uses a richlistbox widget, also known as the "awesome bar", used for searching your URL history. I think it's sluggish and don't like the way it looks. In 3.0 Beta 2 you could turn it off in about:config by setting browser.urlbar.richResults to False. In Beta 3, this setting no longer supported and has no effect. To go back to the old widget you now have to use the Oldbar extension, but as of writing it only supports versions of Firefox up to 3.0b3pre. To force Beta 3 to install the Oldbar extension I had to set extensions.checkCompatibility to False in about:config. To actually enable to extensions I installed the Nightly Tester Tools extension. I then went to the Add-ons list, right clicked on the Oldbar extension and selected 'Make compatible', and restarted Firefox.
At this point I reinstalled the AutoCopy, Paste and Go 2 and Popup ALT Attributes extensions. I'd been previously using these with Firefox 2.0. They seem to work OK in Firefox 3.0 Beta 3.
Update: Setting "extensions.checkUpdateSecurity" to False in about:config may be required for some old extensions to work around the "does not provide secure updates" error.
Update #2: There are some odd rendering issues with Firefox 3.0 beta 3 (which may have also been present in beta 2). See this screenshot, for example.
Update #3: I think the above font rendering problem was caused by some screwy fonts and not Firefox. It seems to have gone away since I deleted a bunch of fonts, anyway.
category: /
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