By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Firefox upgrade

I normally don’t like to use any software whose version number ends in “0.” But I was never particularly happy with Firefox 2.x, so I’ve upgraded to Firefox 3.0. So far, so good. It does seem faster, as advertised, and there have been some cosmetic improvements as well.

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11 Comments

  1. mike_b1

    Dan, did FF3.0 obliterate IE on your machine? It did that to mine; basically, it took over the IE shortcut, and so I had to reinstall IE.I prefer FF, but I do need IE for certain things and I wish Mozilla wouldn’t resort to the dirty tricks.

  2. Dan Kennedy

    Mike: Ooh, that’s not good. I use a Mac, and IE is barely a factor anymore. I’ve got it on my hard drive, but MS hasn’t upgraded it for years, and I don’t know any Macophiles who use it.I suppose the question is whether FF for Mac does anything to Safari, the default Mac browser. I don’t think so, though.

  3. Anonymous

    There is a plugin that allows you to switch to IE while in FF. It’s called IE Tab. I use it for those sites that require IE and it works great.

  4. Mike from Norwell

    Mike B1, are you sure that didn’t just change the preferred web browser setting? If it actually gutted IE, your computer would not work; don’t think it actually uninstalled IE on your computer. If it did actually wiped it out, that’s pretty drastic.If you ever want to change these setting, go to “Set Program Access and Defaults” to switch preferred browser, etc.Have had FF3 up and went pretty seamlessly. About the only annoyance is a few extensions don’t yet work on 3.

  5. io saturnalia!

    I finally broke the chains of IE when a java script error kept me from viewing my Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball team page. Yup, that was the mission-critical function that made me a Firefox convert, and I’ve never looked back.

  6. Ron Newman

    Firefox 3 coexists happily with Safari, Opera, and even Firefox 2 on my Mac. I think it once asked whether I wanted to make it my default browser, but after I said no, it didn’t ask again.

  7. Esther

    I really haven’t had any problems with Firefox 2, so I’m kind of hesitant to upgrade unless it’s really going to make my life better in some concrete way. I guess if it’s faster, that would be good. But 2.0 seems perfectly speedy. I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something.

  8. Brian

    Mike: I was wondering what happened to IE on my laptop, but I never assumed it had anything to do with FF3. Should have put 2 and 2 together. As for problems with FF, I have one. I use Luminotes as a personal wiki, and it has allows you to use bulleting. Now when I use hit tab, rather than indenting it moves my cursor to the address bar. Other than that, I like the new version.

  9. Bill Toscano

    Dan: I have one use for Explorer, and there’s not a lot I can do about it.I do a lot of work in Microsoft Word and other similar programs (Excel, Publisher).You cannot get templates from the Microsoft page unless you are using IE. I keep it around just for that.

  10. MeTheSheeple

    Bill: Try IE Tab, which actually lets you run Internet Explorer from within Firefox. You can program IE Tab to work by default on certain Web sites (e.g., updates.microsoft.com, or perhaps in your case, all of microsoft.com).The genius of that … is you can surf to any Web site, and after realizing there’s a problem once, never have to manually change browsers again. FireFox will automatically launch IE inside a FF window when it gets to the troublesome site.

  11. Bill Toscano

    Thanks, sheeple.I will try that.

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