Upgrading to Firefox 3

I have been using Firefox for a while now and whereas version 2 has been good, it has been plagued with a memory leak that gets so bloated that I have to re-start the browser every couple of hours. So when they announced Firefox 3, I kept wanting to try it out but decided to hold off on the beta builds until they were more stable. Well, they finally came out with the first Release Candidate version, and I decided it’s time to take the plunge.

Lifehacker has a helpful article (as is often the case) on getting Firefox 3 up and running. The most useful tip is getting old extensions to work with the Nightly Tester Tools extension.

Unfortunately, not all was well with the upgrade. After installing Firefox 3 and the Nightly Tester Tools extension to force extension compatibility, Firefox kept crashing on startup. So I had to start it in Safe Mode and disable all the extensions. I then tested them one by one to find out which one really wasn’t compatible. Here’s the good news, the extensions that worked:

• Adblock Plus
• All-in-One Gestures
• coComment (not working completely, does not collect comments)
• Diigo Toolbar
• Email This!
• Google Gears [updated]
• Google Toolbar for Firefox [updated 6/17/2008]
• Grab and Drag
• Greasemonkey
• IE View Lite
• Image Zoom
• Nightly Tester Tools
• Tab Mix Plus (after installing developer build)

And here were the ones that didn’t:

• del.icio.us Complete
• Google Browser Sync (discontinued via Lifehacker)
  

Firefox 3 does seem to be more stable and the memory leak seems to be better contained. With the previous version, the site that caused the worst runaway memory leaks was Google Sites, so I’m leaving it open to see how well Firefox 3 copes with it. Regardless, it looks like the general direction is positive. Now if Google would just show Firefox 3 some love, all would be good.

Update: After trying to use the del.icio.us Complete extension, realized it didn’t work and it looks like this extension is no longer being developed. Had to switch to del.icio.us official Firefox extension.

Update: When trying to install Firefox 3 rc3 on my Thinkpad with Vista, ran into this Windowblinds bug. Upgrading to the latest version of Windowblinds 6.1 build 97 eliminated the problem.