Firefox 3.5 First Impressions

I’m a Firefox fangirl of long standing.  That said, I had very nearly completely switched completely to Chrome while on my less-than-powerful work computer because of the sheer bloat that Firefox seemed to carry with it.

Chrome was fast. Zooming fast.  Chrome had a tiny little memory footprint. Running Chrome and QuickBooks together didn’t make my computer sputter and stall.

What Chrome was not, and still is not, is nearly as customizable, and I like customization.  While there were clone addons that worked similarly to the essential-for-paranoids AdBlocker and NoScript, there were several others that were missing that I consider near essentials.

So now we have Firefox 3.5.  I’ve played around with it for a few days since its official release, and I am very pleased.   It was fast to start up (3.0 regularly took 5 minutes or more), it was even faster to close down. The one time that it did crash, the recovery tool allowed me to load the “safe” tabs, but skip reloading the tab that caused the crash.

I ran it, with five tabs open, one of them being a fairly memory-intensive site, with QuickBooks.  My work computer did not die.

So so far, Firefox 3.5 has passed what few tests I could put it through with flying colors.  If you’ve downloaded it and are looking for some basic and addons, here are my recommendations:

• NoScript and AdBlock Plus:  These two are essential if you’re at all worried about security.  NoScript blocks all scripts running on any page until you give permission to run them, and AdBlock blocks the places malicious scripts most like to hide: in advertisements.  Besides, the web without ads is a slightly prettier place to be.

• X-Marks: This was formerly FoxMarks, the bookmark manager that would sync your bookmarks across multiple locations (work and home, for instance).  It’s now added password syncing and support for Safari and Internet Explorer (hence the name change).  Since the best password is a randomly generated one that you don’t know, this helps insure that you don’t have to remember the passwords. Xmarks does it for you.

• Read it Later: I’m fond of online books and web libraries…but I don’t always want to clog up my bookmarks with stories that I want to read but probably won’t visit again once I’ve read them, or research materials I’ll only need temporarily.  Read it Later keeps a links list of things that you want to read but don’t necessarily want to keep on your bookmarks list…once read, you can easily mark them read and remove them.

There are others, of course, for more advanced and specific purposes, but these are the ones that I absolutely am unwilling to do without. The others are just icing on the cake.

Technology Firefox, Reviews