A lot of people are praising Firefox 3 and have been using it since the first beta. I recommended not to use it before. But now, the final version of Firefox 3 is only four days away, so the final version will be mostly the same as Release Candidate 3. However, RC 3 is still not ready, and made me go back to Firefox 2.

I installed Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 yesterday, and have been using it most of yesterday and most of today. During these two days, I have found obvious and very annoying bugs that make it impossible for me to use it. Actually come to think of it, I don’t know if they are obvious, because I haven’t seen anyone else report these problems. But I don’t think they’re exclusive to my computer.

My first problem was with Google. Firefox 3 RC 3 didn’t seem to be accepting cookies from Google. How strange, because I haven’t changed absolutely anything on my computer except installing FF3. I checked on my other computer running FF2, and all was fine. The problem was that I had to log in each time I opened Firefox. It wouldn’t keep me logged in, it kept logging me out. And it was forgetting that my home page was set to iGoogle, as it wouldn’t load iGoogle unless I clicked the link from the Google classic home page. Every time I navigated away from Google and then back to it, it logged me out and took me to Google classic.

Another thing was plugins not working. I installed a beta version of FireFTP, but there was no replacement for Fasterfox. Firefox became notably slower without Fasterfox, even after tweaking the about:config settings.

Speaking of speed, it didn’t seem any faster in loading online apps like Gmail. It took the same amount of time to load Gmail, Digg, and other script-heavy sites. Add to this the lack of Fasterfox, and Firefox 3 RC3 became slower than Firefox 2, the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

Continuing on with the problems, when writing the previous post here on Wordplop, I noticed there was no spell check. They certainly didn’t take out the feature, which so many people praise and depend on, so it must be a bug. Once again I don’t know if it’s only happening on my computer or others’ too, but I haven’t seen any other complaints like this. I also found spell check not working on forums and basically anywhere where there is a text box. It was working in all of these places with FF2, so it’s definitely Firefox 3’s problem.

The last bug I took note of before I decided to uninstall RC3 was that pressing the “Enter” (or “Return”) key while in a text field makes the entire page scroll to the top. So when I was making that last post here, every time I hit “Enter” to make a new paragraph, the page jumped up. This was the last straw - I downloaded Firefox 2 and reinstalled it, deleting Firefox 3 RC 3.

These weren’t the only bugs or annoyances I found. There were also problems with history not being saved, toolbar clicks not registering, and toolbar submenus not opening on mouse hover.

I hope it’s not just me having these bugs, because then they will get fixed faster. These problems make it impossible to use Firefox daily. I really hope all of this gets fixed before release date, or I won’t be downloading Firefox 3.

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