Taking the plunge (or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Firefox 3)

So, Ubuntu screwed me over fracked up my profile when they decided to change the default browser in Hardy (to Firefox 3.0).

After much sorrow and dispair (where I accidently started Firefox 3 a couple of times and my trick for restoring the addons didn’t work. The first time I didn’t have a backup of my profile) I decided the time had come to take the plunge and switch to Firefox 3.

In order for this to be a success there were some things that needed to work:

• StumbleUpon
• Adblock Plus
• DownThemAll!
• ForecastFox
• Foxmarks
• FoxyProxy
• Sage

as well as my netbank and some internal web applications and internal addons (IBM internal).

Beside these there are some nice to have addons

• TinyURL Creator
• SecurePassword Generator
• PDF Download
• Fission
• Remember Mismatched Domains

At first Firefox wouldn’t even start. Launching it from a shell showed a problem with the Remember Mismatched Domains addon. A little Googling (with Opera :)) revealed that this extension is no longer needed in Firefox 3. Started Firefox in safe-mode and removed it.

As expected many of the addons (including some not in this list) did not work. The easiest way of dealing with these addons is to install the Nightly Tester Tools for Firefox. Once installed the tool allows you to force load the incompatible addons. This has worked for all the addons that I use, except Sage.

I did a little digging and found out the Sage has been ported to Firefox 3 under the name Sage-Too. It works just as well as Sage in Firefox 2.

As for Java I have to use an internal build of IBM’s JRE. The plugin package does not install itself into Firefox 3 but this can be fixed by running

$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/libjavaplugin.so xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/j2re1.5-ibm/jre/bin/libjavaplugin_oji.so 60
$ sudo update-alternatives --config xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so

and then selecting option 2. It also seems to work with my netbank.

All in all my experience so far has been pleasant except for a problem with Sage-Too concerning password protected feeds. It turned out to be a bug or feature surrounding Firefox 3, XMLHttpRequest and extensions/chrome code. Since it should be fixed in RC1 I decided to upgrade Firefox.

After upgrading Sage-Too also works with password protected feeds. Firefox 3RC1 seems to be a bit more unstable than beta 5 (two-three crashes a day) but my guess is that it is because of the extensions.