Firefox 6 Is Better (21th August 2011)
After a week or two with the newest version I am finally enjoying Firefox again. It seems the GUI is more responsive and has a tad more native feel, although still doesn’t quite fit in with Windows XP Royale.
Much of my satisfaction is thanks to the Vertical Tabs extension used in tandem with Sidebar Unifier. This seamless combination lets me optimise screen space even with lots of tabs and bookmarks open at the same time.
Going from 3 to 3.6 to 6 reminds me a little of going from version 1 to 1.5 to 2. Looks like the rate of change is making things tough for extension developers but I’ve got all the essentials I need. (Even though a couple were labelled ‘experimental’.)
Still Not Perfect
An obvious oversight is no more downloads indicator because the Status Bar is gone. Turning that on again is easy…oh, wait, it isn’t in View or View > Toolbars either! So yeah, there is no way to view download progress!
Opening the Downloads Manager is possible from Ctrl+J but if you remember, Firefox “won’t have hacker-focus”.
Tools > Downloads is the new way to open the extra window which tells you what is happening due to you clicking something in the main window. (You would then have confirmed that click in one or two dialogue windows immediately afterwards.)
A distinctly clunky regression when the point of the World Wide Web is to share files, imho.
Oh, you can’t middle-click anything in the Add-ons Manager. That makes browsing and comparing difficult. A web browser should be good at browsing, imho. You can’t click (or even copy-and-paste) the URLs extension authors provide in their descriptions! This is bad.
It still hogs all the resources it can get its paws on. Firefox, you aren’t the only program I use. Stop bullying my system. And seriously, displaying a few screens of formatted text should never take hundreds of megabytes of memory.