Thomas Nybergh

Firefox 3 Beta 2 has a few quirks and instabilities, but is generally much faster and more pleasant to use than 2.x (I’ve tried the official win32 release and various Linux compiles), so I hope I’ll be able to keep using it. A few non-critical extensions which I normally use, haven’t been updated for this version yet, but the speed improvements and the better rendering engine make me unwilling to spend any more time with 2.x. I’ve been surfing around with the beta all day, and the only really annoying issue so far has been a few tabs that refused to display any page content, but it seems like closing Firefox and opening a completely new session fixed that (yes, Firefox 3 has an improved session manager). At this point this only seems to happen while I’m writing in WordPress (the WordPress rich text editor also does weird stuff now and then).

In one of my earlier posts in Finnish, I mentioned that CookieSafe together with Adblock Plus, NoScript, Tor and Torbutton are must have tools for those who wish to avoid some privacy issues. I should update that post, as it seems like the team behind CookieSafe won’t be updating their old extension to support Firefox 3. Instead they offer a new, somewhat crippled version called CSLite, which doesn’t display blocked third party cookies the same way as the old version used to do. What they’ve done is not all bad, it actually simplifies things, but why not give the user the option to enable the old style of indicating what first and third party cookies the current web page has tried to set? Sure, hiding information makes your software “easier to use”, but the habit of killing features is indeed a goddamn disease. I’ve obviously switched to CSLite, but this change really irritates me.