Firefox 3 was released with a bang on June 17th, aka Download Day, and made world record for the most number of download for a software in 24 hours. I joined in the effort with two downloads, one for my PC (Coordinator) and one for the work laptop, but I wasn't able to really play with it until a couple days later, when I got my new glasses.

Glasses? Yeah, the frame of my 5-year-old glasses snapped in the middle the night before the Download Day and, being a heavily myopic person, I was half-blind for the days that followed. I managed to download Firefox 3 without problem and immediately gained a new appreciation for the improved zoom feature. I don't usually go beyond a single zoom level, but in my half-blind state, I had to zoom in at least 4-5 times, and boy was I glad to find things still smooth and readable after several Ctrl+. However, I probably needed 8-9 zooms to really be able to browse the websites somewhat so I pretty much gave up using the computer. The Windows magnifier was too bothersome and only covered a small area to be useful to me, btw.

The fact that I was pretty sick for the week didn't help much, but at least I had something to do away from the computer. Sleep! I slept almost 11 hours a day! The last time I did this was when I was quite sick a couple years ago...

Zooming back (pun intended) to after I receive the new pair of glasses. Finally, I got to play with my pet browser!

First off, all but one of my add-ons were updated. I'm still missing Converter as of now, but this one used to be Mozilla only so I can bear the wait. My brother wasn't so lucky and kept checking for updates everyday, and he finally either installed alpha versions or forced the version to go with Firefox 3. He couldn't live without all his add-ons, it seemed. We both use Personas so no issue with the themes.

The active tab wasn't distinguishable with Personas at first, but that was quickly rectified by the latest Personas version. The Japanese rock festival pack was also included in the update, which for some reason failed to install when I tried manually before. I've been sticking to Groovy Blue on Coordinator, but the one I used on the work laptop was nowhere to be found... It's changed to Foxkeh Kodomo no Hi at the moment.

One of the most discussed feature of Firefox 3 is probably the Awesome Bar, and I agree. It was also the first thing my brother complained to me about (I was half-blind at the time and just told him to figure it out himself). Now that I've used it, I have to say it's a bitter sweet experience thus far. On one hand, it does make going to some places easier which might have otherwise taken me a couple minutes, but it can be annoying if you usually just visit certain sites regularly. It also reveals a lot more about one's surfing history, which explains why my brother was extremely against me using his laptop to go online while waiting for Coordinator to finish some CPU hogging tasks. Totally understandable.

I'd say without any tweaking, the Awesome Bar is a great tool for someone who's jumping to places online and not so useful for someone who's staying within the boundaries of certain domains. On the basis that you're not sharing the computer with someone else, of course. Maybe this is solvable by just simply setting up different profiles? I'll never know...

One beef I have with Firefox 3 is that it doesn't warn me when I close the browser with multiple tabs if I enabled opening previous tabs at the browser start-up. While it's true that the tabs will still be there when I start the browser, it takes time to load all of them. Considering that I typically have 20 or so tabs opened, it can be irritating, especially if there's Nico Nico or YouTube in there. Hopefully it'll be fixed in 3.0.2 (3.0.1 should have frozen already and I don't think the fix is there).

Firefox 3 doesn't change that much for me, but it's the little things that make an impression, such as the better rendering of text and graphic and zoom, the search function within the add-ons manager, and download time shown on the task bar. The resume download thing is a hit and miss for me so far, but my brother has no problem at all. But then again, he doesn't usually download large files like video and game demos so he rarely have to pause it in order to load a streaming video. As for the other thing that people tend to talk about, the key hole interface, it doesn't really affect me. Yeh for Personas and small icons. XD

On a side note, I recently learned that the Taiwanese pronounces YouTube as you-to-be (as in the words "you to be" in English), and the Japanese pronounces it as yoh-tsu-bei. Interesting, eh?