Comments on: Upgrading a Firefox 1.0.7 user

By: Pete

Pete — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 21:54:14 +0000

“Tabs? Memory improvements? JS performance improvements? Awesome bar? Phishing protection?”
That’s exactly the problem: For an end user the difference between 1.0 and 3.x is not that big. Most improvements happened under the hood and they only recognize that booting FF3 now takes longer. I’ve had this frustrating experience with end users more than once…

By: Ron

Ron — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 19:56:13 +0000

That’s a hard one. Any one of the things you listed are huge reasons to upgrade (well, with the exception of tabs, they’ve been in there since Phoenix 0.1 ).

So what one change would I choose? It would depend on who I was talking to.

If I were talking to me, it would definitely be the Awesome bar. I’ve been using Fx 3 since before it was officially released, and I still smile every time I use the Awesome bar. I can’t live without it.

For anyone else (unless I knew they had a specific hot button), I would probably choose phishing protection, but I would explain it as “Firefox protects you from bad stuff on the Internet, so you never have to worry about junk getting on your computer and messing it up or slowing it down.” As you can see, I talk to mostly non-technical people.

But normally when I’m trying to get someone to switch (and without the artificial constraint), I go with something like, “it’s much faster than Internet Explorer, protects you from all kinds of bad stuff out there–and let me show you what you can do with this thing they call the Awesome bar!”

If that doesn’t work and they’re middle aged or older, I show then ForecastFox. That usually seals the deal.

By: Fred

Fred — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 19:45:50 +0000

See, I was unaware of the fact that tabbed browsing only came to Firefox post-1.0.7. When was it added?

Anyway, that would definitely be the number one improvement over a non-tabbed browsing version of Firefox.

By: deb

deb — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 18:33:35 +0000

If I had to pick just one, I’d say “awesomebar” because it has absolutely changed how I use my browser. But there are so many others.

By: MT

MT — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:26:34 +0000

For me as web developer, huge *Gecko rendering engine improvements*â€”including Reflow refactoring, CSS support improvements, tons of bugfixes and some useful features like soft hyphen supportâ€”are most valuable changes in Firefox since version 1.0. Awesomebar is quite nice feature too.

By: Julien

Julien — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:01:28 +0000

I would choose tags. Tags are really useful.
As a Linux user, i would have to say the integration with the system, too.

By: Dorus

Dorus — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 12:41:00 +0000

Best new feature? Difficult…

Reorder tab is high on my list for sure, followed by session restore. Beside that i’m probably going to need a list of changes between 1.07 and 3.05, as the best change is probably one i can’t even remember

Ofcourse another big one is the huge list of extensions available these days, but that’s not really a new feature

By: Da Scritch

Da Scritch — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 10:25:33 +0000

Pfffiiiooouuu

I miss 0.9.1 because of its contextual navigation toolbar. We don’t have it anymore and that’s sad. Some websites were very useful with. The Links Widgets is not enough.
In 0.9.8, we lose on the fly theme changing. Now, we have to start again, as in MS-Windows.

Between 1.0.7 and 3.0.7 ?
Heeeeemmm.

Memorizing opened tabs. And reopening ones we just closed.

By: David Naylor

David Naylor — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 09:47:47 +0000

Wow, I wouldn’t know where to start either. I think you chose a good feature to explain though, since it will produce dialogs every now and then that your friend will have to click through.

By: Ryan Scott Scheel

Ryan Scott Scheel — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 08:23:37 +0000

Speed improvements, of course.