Mozilla just marked another milestone in its long trek to Firefox 3 by releasing the fourth beta version of the software. After a few hours of testing, I’m ready to pronounce it much faster than its predecessor and much less of a memory hog.
That said, I had a lot of trouble getting the application up and running. After I initially downloaded it from Mozilla, I launched the new browser and it crashed immediately. Repeated launches led to repeated crashes.
I erased the program and downloaded it again. Crash.
I erased the program again, then erased Firefox 2, then downloaded it again. Crash.
I dug through my program files and deleted all files associated with Firefox, then I deleted every other Firefox remnant I could find on my computer, then I downloaded it again. Crash.
As I was deleting the program for about the 20th time, I noticed a box that asked if I wanted to erase all the add-ons, passwords and everything else associated with my Firefox profile. I checked the box, erased everything again and downloaded beta 4 again.
Everything worked perfectly.
I assume that one of my add-ons was so incompatible with the update that it caused all those crashes, but I’m really not sure why that would be.
(Add-ons are little programs you add to a browser to make it do special tasks, like blocking ads. Many add-ons that were written for Firefox 2 have not been updated yet for Firefox3.)
Why would I want to go through all this trouble? Because each new version of Firefox is much faster than its predecessor. What’s more, Firefox 3 renders Web sites beautifully and it allows users to “zoom in” for larger text and pages.
It’s really a big step up.
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