Why I’m Downgrading to Firefox 2

Of all the software I have on my computer—and there's a lot!—without question, the application I use the most is my browser. I get my news from it. Stay in touch with friends through it. Play Scrabble on it. Write blog posts with it.

So I do not appreciate having unwanted changes to it thrust upon me. In fact, the reason I now use Firefox is because, when I "upgraded" to Internet Explorer 7 a couple of years ago, they had so messed up the interface that I hated it. About that time, I was hearing lots of good things about FF and, when I tried it out, I was thrilled to discover that it had almost the identical interface to earlier versions of IE.

I've been very happy with Firefox since I switched. And I've gotten so used to the regular pop-ups advising me that there were updates to it, that I've just gotten in the habit of installing them, since they were usually back-end type fixes and performance improvements. So when I got the most recent pop-up, I totally missed the fact that it was a full upgrade to version 3. Until I launched it.

The changes to the buttons on the navigation toolbar immediately caught my eye. In v2, they looked like this:

Here are the new ones:

After my initial surprise, I thought that this would be fine. The new design adds absolutely nothing to the browser, that I can see, but it doesn't take anything away from it either. All the same buttons appeared to be there, in the same location, so no biggie.

Then I discovered something I actually liked better about this new version. In the location bar, they had previously had the icon that let you subscribe to a site's RSS feed if it had one. Now they had added an icon to let you bookmark any page right from there. I always like having multiple options for achieving the same thing, so this seemed like a benefit of the new UI.

So up to that point, I was perfectly fine with the upgrade... And then it happened.

As usual, I had been surfing around to all sorts of sites in multiple tabs and I needed to go back to one of the pages I had visited earlier. Now, in Firefox 2, I would have clicked the down arrow on the location bar and seen this (the following images have been modified to fit the page):

But when I clicked the arrow in the new browser, this is what I got:

Ugh. Besides the visual assault of the giant font and far-more-
information-than-I-need listings, I realized that this list did not represent the sites I'd visited in my current session. Instead, they were sites I had bookmarked at some point in the past. I think they may have been sorted by most recently bookmarked, but I'm not even 100% sure of this, because I can't remember exactly when I bookmarked them.

Now, maybe I'm different from most people, but my list of bookmarks has absolutely no correlation to my current browsing requirements. For example, the first item on the list, "Domestic Travel Fast Facts," is a page I bookmarked for an article I was writing... last July! I doubt if I'll ever need to go there again.

Another problem is that, over the years, I have bookmarked approximately 4 gazillion web pages. So having a quick way to get back to 7 or 8 of them is not likely to be particularly helpful. (Perhaps the Firefox developers assume that I'm going to be cleaning up my bookmarks on a regular basis. Um, no.)

What WOULD be helpful would be to be able to go back to a page I had looked at earlier in my browsing session. Like I could do in
Firefox 2!

I went to Mozilla's Firefox 3 new features page to try to figure out what they were thinking with this change in behaviour. Here's how they describe the "Smart Location Bar."

"A quick way to get to the sites you love—even the ones with addresses you only vaguely remember. The new Firefox 3 location bar learns as you use it—it’s so highly evolved that we like to call it the 'Awesome Bar'. Over time, it adapts to your preferences and offers better fitting matches. Type in a term and the autocomplete function includes possible matching sites from your browsing history, as well as sites you’ve bookmarked and tagged in a drop down. For example, you could enter the tag: 'investments' to find 'www.fool.com'. Matched terms are highlighted, making the list of results easy to scan." (Italics mine.)

Well, I don't know how much "time" it's going to need to figure out that I don't want it to try to guess where I want to go, when I already know perfectly well, but I'm not going to wait around and see. And I'm not sure how good it is as learning anyway. I tried to delete some of these listings from the dropdown bar, which I would assume would tell the browser that I don't want them there, but they kept coming back.

I did look through all the browser's options and right-clicked on the location bar to see if there was any way to revert back to its previous behavior, but I couldn't find any way to do that. So I have since re-installed version 2, which works exactly as I want it to.

Now, if someone shows me that there is a way to make v3's "Awesome Bar" work the way that has worked so well for me for two years, then I might reconsider. But someone's also going to have to make a convincing case that there is some other benefit of the new version that I simply can't live without. Otherwise, the next time I get a pop-up asking me when I want to upgrade to a new version of Firefox, you can be sure that I'll be clicking the "Never" box.

Did this post help you? Share it with others!