Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

Since there was a call for testers on the freebsd-ports@ mailing list about Mozilla Firefox 3, I decided to give it a go. I had to patch the Makefile not to pull in dbus-glib as an unconditional dependency. I don't believe in D-Bus and don't want it on my system. If I allow Firefox to link with it, it would be the only thing sitting on the message bus too, which feels a bit crazy.

So, Firefox 3. The Mozillians have been sniffing way too much of the userfriendly glue. I already blogged about the too much handholding and the way they've confused security and trust when I tested one of the early betas.

Since I last tested, a workaround has been added to reduce the userfriendliness and increase the usability of self-signed certificates: setting the browser.xul.error_pages.expert_bad_cert option to true roughly halves the number of hoops you have to jump through in order to get the certificate recognized. Great.

The idea of bookmarking also seems to have become even more entrenched in the browser since my last test. I have never really used bookmarks. I've recently started vaguely using del.icio.us but bookmarks really aren't my thing. I guess some people must be into the idea though.

Using tinymenu and littlefox and some creative interface reshuffling, it's still possible to hide most of the bookmark nonsense so that it doesn't get in the way. The only thing I haven't been able to get rid of yet, is the new "add bookmark" button that has been added to the address bar. I'm sure a way exists, I just need to find it.

Overall, despite the userfriendliness, Firefox 3 is an improvement. It feels a bit faster and it still renders the stuff I want it to render fine. It's still a webbrowser though. Nothing to get overly excited about. More than 90% of the stuff being delivered over HTTP is worthless and it's only getting worse. Firefox 3 with enough extensions and some creative tweaking to make it less userfriendly and more usable allows you to sift through the crap in relative comfort.

I will try to resist the urge to downgrade again. Maybe if I feel sufficiently bored, I'll cook up a patch to make LANG=C less usefriendly and more useful. Don't hold your breath.