Okay, so I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox 3 for a couple of days now.  And’s here’s my basic impression: Mozilla is full of crap.

There are supposedly all sorts of new and improved features.  Safer?  Maybe, though I’ve never really had a problem with that in Firefox 2.  Smarter?  More annoying so far as I can tell.  It’s full of new bookmark features that I don’t want and wish there was a way to turn off.  The only thing smarter as far as I’m concerned are the new icons which look smarter, as in snazzier, not more intelligent.

But one thing that Firefox 3 most definitely is on my computer, is slower.  Everything I do is slower.  Not faster, like Mozilla claims, but slower. S – L – O – W – E – R.  Slower.

The most annoying thing of all is that now is that it’s so slow to close that when I close it and open a new session, I keep getting this error message:

And so I wait.  And try again.  And sometimes it eventually works.  And sometimes I have to wait more.  Eventually it finishes closing, and eventually I can open a new session.  But I’ve never even remotely had this problem with Firefox 2.  This is most assuredly a Firefox 3 “feature” to be this very slow to close.  The error simply is, Firefox 3 is slow.

(For those of you wondering why I do this, I have a  1920×1200 resolution.  I thought it would be nice to put some of my various web-mail and forum links on the desktop, grouped next to Mozilla Thunderbird, since I have so much unused real estate.  So as I check each, I close each one when I’m done and open the next.  Perhaps strange behavior, I know, but when you have more bookmarks than you know what to do with, you start looking for interesting new ways to make the important ones stand out from the general mish-mash.  It worked absolutely fine with Firefox 2.  But the “faster” Firefox 3 is so much slower that it no longer works so well.)

This is just one example.  As I said, everything in Firefox 3 seems to be slower.  Firefox 3 takes noticably longer to start up.  Pages take easily twice the time to load.  It’s like my hard drive got downgraded.  But it’s not my hard drive.  It’s Firefox 3.

And for what?  A bunch of gimmicky features that I’d rather remove.  What I’d rather have is a Firefox Lite.  If I want stupid features that make my browser crap I’ll use Internet Explorer, thanks.

Honestly, after “upgrading” to Firefox 3, I’m seriously considering switching to Opera.  Firefox 3 is just that bad.  (And no, I’m never going back to IE until Microsoft learns from their mistakes.  You do not force the menu bar to be the second bar from the top.  It’s the first.  It’s always the first.  And the GUI bloopers just get worse.  It’s like Microsoft forgot what a GUI is even there for, which is to be intuitive.)

My advice?  If you haven’t made the mistake of upgrading to Firefox 3 yet, then don’t.  Stick with Firefox 2.  It’s faster.  It’s just as functional.  And it’s not as cluttered with features.