Mark Rizzn Hopkins writes over at Mashable how he’s pissed off with Firefox. He’s not alone. I dumped Firefox 2 and switched to Flock after trying Safari for a short time (it doesn’t play nice with WordPress). Then I tried Webkit for a while, super fast, and now I’m back at Firefox 3 as everybody told me they’d finally fixed Firefox and all was good again.
It’s not good. It’s better, but its better than crappy. FF3 still crashes, still leaks memory (not always, but particularly on streaming video sites), and has other bugs that don’t make my day miserable, but they’re not a positive contribution either. Just going to write this post and I couldn’t type in FF3: had to close one tab (had less than 10 open) to get FF to allow me to type again. Maybe I’ve got rose colored glasses, but I think FF 1.5 will be remembered as the last great Firefox release, because I never remember having any of these problems then, even going back as far as 0.8 beta.
To answer Rizzn’s poll question: yes, I’d happily pay for a browser that was stable, quick and bug free. Note though that it would REALLY have to be all of those things, and so far I just haven’t seen a browser able to meet that criteria.
