Firefox 3
I hate to say this, I really do, but: I don’t think I like the new version of Firefox. I want to like it, but they’ve just made some of the standard features look hideous to my eyes. The biggest eyesore, in my opinion, is the fancy new autocomplete feature (which I have not found a way to turn off):
I don’t like being a stick in the mud, because I bet this is probably one of the dev team’s favourite features, but I find this new autocomplete difficult to read, and completely unnecessary. All you want to see in an autocomplete is the domain you’re trying to complete. Why do I care about their meta data? Meta-data is really just marketing blather, and if I’m typing a domain name, chances are I already know what I’m looking for. Why do I need the browser to make my eyes bleed with all of this badly rendered, improperly sized nonsense?
[edit] Oldbar to the rescue. Thanks, Michael! [/edit]
The skin leaves something to be desired as well:
I realize that the skin can be changed, but I just need to point out that the dropdown on the right-hand side of the grayed out right-arrow is simply badly placed. When I first started using this new version, I wanted to navigate back to a page I had been at about ten clicks ago. At first glance, I didn’t think that the dropdown-arrow was clickable because the right-arrow beside it was grayed out. I was in a rush and didn’t have time to mess around with the browser, so I just clicked the back arrow ten times to get where I wanted to go. Later I discovered that the dropdown-arrow was actually clickable even though it doesn’t look like it. If I found this confusing, imagine how my mom (or worse, grandmother) will find it when they try to use it?
They also changed the download manager:
Again, what is going on with the font-sizing and kerning? This looks like it’s actually a web-page. My mom would see this, think that her computer had a virus, and she’d call me for help.
Last but not least, CSS formatting is all different:
See how “/entertainment/” wraps to the second line? That line has a “white-space: nowrap” and an “overflow: hidden” on it. It used to just disappear on the right-hand side of that box, but now for some reason it wraps to the second line. I’m not going to get too upset about this one. I’ve dealt with web standards for years and years, and often when things like this crop up, it actually means that the way it worked before was incorrect, and his is how it was supposed to work all along. But it is still annoying that I’m going to have to go through all of my applications with a fine-tooth comb and fix all of the new css glitches that are going to crop up because Firefox “fixed” some things.
