A half-workday with Firefox 3
…makes me want to switch to Safari.
It’s just incredibly and unnecessary cluttered with questionable features and unnecessary interface elements. They want me to input “tags” everywhere (honestly guys, nobody except geeks knows what tags are). The Awesome Bar is a disaster. The interface has more of everything: more buttons, more icons, more text. It’s extremely busy, and it slows me down while visually scanning.
The OS X interface is inferior to Firefox 2’s. It may look slightly more similar, in that they made everything dark gray. And I’m glad they fixed some of the annoying bugs, like the lingering tooltips. But that’s all I can say for it. The form widgets are clunky, awkward, and ugly. The browser’s window and toolbar follow none of the OS standards and inherit none of the niceties that native interfaces get for free.
Clearly, Firefox is being designed by geeks, for geeks. I’m sure having tagging inputs everywhere fits in nicely with their world. But this release shows that the Firefox project management has lost touch with reality and the needs of normal users.
I’m strongly considering a permanent switch to Safari.