This entry is by no means a review or a criticism; just a need to mention how I feel.
First reaction: what the hell, extensions? But, this isn’t really a big deal; I’m sure, with time, the themes and extensions I’ve grown so accustomed to will update their versions and all will be right.
One thing I really hate right off the bat is the Location bar. I hate that it automatically has your twelve latest (or most frequent? or whatever) bookmarks in the drop-down. I usually have my history cleared when I exit the browser, because the hampering of the text dropping sloppily off the Location bar has always bothered me. With the history cleared, this wasn’t a problem. I like the clean, empty, sterile feeling of a cleared search history and location history. This is no longer possible.
And not only do they stick them there (is it possible to disable this new feature? I’ve looked all over for a disabling option), they make them huge. Like, 40px-in-height huge. I usually try my damndest to keep my navigation and menu bars as small as possible. This is not conducive to my efforts at all.
I mean, even Mashable talks about potential drawbacks of the “Awesome Location Bar.” Hm, I guess I should have read that article before even starting this entry.
But, I guess I would need to explain my use of the browser bookmarks in order for anyone else to understand my frustration. My use of the browser bookmarks is very limited; I only use it to link to things like admin and login pages. I purposely organize my bookmarks so that I don’t have to search them; and if I ever wanted to save a URL to something that I would search, that’s what I have my del.icio.us for. I don’t have the patience to sync the two at all, nor do I ever feel the need to.
Auto-completion usually bothers me. I don’t know, maybe I’m weird. I understand its convenience in things like tags and very specific strings you imagine yourself needing to type over and over again, but if I want to go to a specific article I’ve bookmarked, I would never start typing the URL in the location bar. What Awesome Location Bar tries to do, essentially, is auto-complete anything you type in the location bar, you dig? I don’t.
Awesome Location Bar aside, I have no other qualms about Firefox 3. But that damn thing almost makes me want to downgrade back until the Awesome factor of the location bar is made optional.
Meh.
None.