Don’t Upgrade to Firefox 2 Yet
November 4th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Random Thoughts, ToolsIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
The thing I love about Firefox is extensions, I can customize my browser to work with the extensions I find most useful. However when they upgrade I go through the headache of incompatibility. I thought I had waited long enough but I guess not and spent two hours going through configuration hell today.
I’m a bad speller no two ways about it. the SpellBound Development 0.9.8.20060108 extension was a God send however it’s not compatible with firefox 2 that’s a problem. But wait doesn’t Firefox 2 have built in spell check? Well firefox 2 only checks multi-line forms not single line forms so I’ve given up some functionality in upgrading.
Next the suggest function doesn’t work with Menu Editor. What does menu editor do? When you install extensions sometimes they add things to the right click context menu, so the pop up menu can get large and hard to work with, menu editor lets you turn them on or off individually. So unless I want to spell like a monkey I have to disable it and deal with the big cumbersome menus again.
Next up Aardvark doesn’t work with firefox 2.0. What does that extension do? If you work in CSS it allows you to highlight CSS classes with ID’s, it works much better in helping you debug CSS than the web developer toolbar. Lastly CopyUrlPlus doesn’t work with Firefox 2. I’ve been using that one since NickW pointed it out. It just makes copying sections and linking to them incredibly easy.
So to sum it up by upgrading I lost functionality, have to deal with annoyances, and give up productivity, so Don’t Upgrade to Firefox 2 Yet.
Update It also comes with the incredibly annoying prefetch feature turned on by default.
Sphere It
November 4th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
To make Firefox extension compatible just use MR Tech extension.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/421/
Replace Aardvark with Platypus and Firebug
http://platypus.mozdev.org/
http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/
Vastly superior.
November 4th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
To late.I already installed 2.0 version, and I like it.I saw that some addons and themes are not available for 2.0 but they will appear.
Also if you find a spell checker for FF 2.0 please send it to me, because I’m not a native english , and this could help me.
Thanks
November 4th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
The MR Tech extention seemed to work although I do wonder if I created problems for myself down the road …
November 4th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
SEOLinks and Snapper also caused me to uninstall 2.0
November 4th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Yeah, I always made it a point since FF started releasing these minor updates every-so-often to wait like a month before I installed it just to deal with the extensions compatibility issues. Seemed to be enough. You can always roll back and wait.
November 4th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
I learned my lesson the hard way. I upgraded to FF2.0 and quickly realized — it sucks. None of my plugins worked and everything was broken. I un-installed 2.0 and re-installed 1.5.0.7 — and it works like a charm right now.
I’m stick’ to 1.5.0.7 for now.
November 5th, 2006 at 3:21 am
I agree.. I also uninstalled 2.0 and re-installed 1.5.0.7. We will just have to wait but I like the MR addon. Thnx for the tip.
November 6th, 2006 at 10:30 am
1) To spell check a single line, right click and choose ‘Spell Check This Field’
3) I have Aardvark for Firefox 2 that has the install file upgraded. If you want it, email me.
November 6th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
To have FF2 spell check all fields (not just textareas):
Type about:config into the address bar.
find and change this value to:
layout.spellcheckDefault = 2
November 6th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
sweet thanks!
November 7th, 2006 at 11:59 am
I use ColorZilla to scan the page for CSS elements, etc… When you enable it, it shows you the Document element on the statusbar…
February 12th, 2007 at 3:22 am
As an update to my comment above: I’ve not too long ago upgraded to Firefox 2.0 and I’ve been very happy with its performance.
All my extensions work and it’s running very smoothly.
I recommend the upgrade now to people.
November 7th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Two things that annoy me about the spell check feature of FF 2
- It is difficult to remove an accidentally added word to your local database
- Having to add new words to each pc running FF 2. Why can’t there be some online cache of your new words.
Overall, FF 2 is a better product then FF 1. I didn’t know the prefetch was turned on. I might have to go turn that off.