Friday, July 18, 2008

Firefox 3, and a Few Things You Should Know

Firefox 3 was finally released yesterday. It’s supposed to be better and faster than Firefox 2. I hope so. I was fairly happy with Firefox 1.5.0.7, and the increments of Firefox 2 have been fairly painful. It was almost painful enough that I would have scrapped Firefox to use Internet Explorer, except for the fact that I have several Firefox extensions that I’ve reached the point of being unable to live without on a regular basis, so I bore the instability and memory leak on Firefox 2. I finally broke down and installed the beta of Firefox 3 on my laptop when temperatures went up and I couldn’t take the memory leak anymore.

One of the worst parts of Firefox is that every time a new release comes out. some extensions break. Either the developers stop updating them or they just fall away, I don’t know. One of my favorite extensions over the last several years is Tab Mix Plus. Firefox, by default, displays all tabs in one horizontal bar. I can have between 30 and 50 tabs open at any given time, so that gets very impractical for me. Tab Mix Plus gives the ability to display tabs in multi-rows, which is very helpful. Also, I like to open a new tab next to the current one rather than at the end of the line. That keeps my tabs together. As far as I know, only Tab Mix Plus does this. I expected to lose some extensions after upgrading to Firefox 3, and Tab Mix Plus was one of them. I found out today though, that Tab Mix Plus for Firefox 3 is available on Download.com. I don’t know why it’s not on the Mozilla extensions page.

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