What Caused So Many People to Stick to Firefox 2.x?

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Whenever I see a new version of one of my commonly-used applications become available, I'll download without putting too much thought into it. Sometimes, I don't even look to see what's new feature-wise. After all, there's more than just features that come to new versions of applications, such as security fixes, and possibly also stability fixes. So when Firefox 3 came out, I didn't put much thought into an upgrade. It appears that there are many who did, however.

As a last-ditch effort to have people upgrade their Firefox 2 to 3, Mozilla prompted people running 2 to fill out a quick survey to explain their reasons for not upgrading to the latest version. Can you even guess? Believe it or not, 25% of people said that the robust bookmarks feature was the main reason, because with it, you could easily get caught by family members if you're using your PC for more than just business and gaming!

For those not familiar with how Firefox 3 handles bookmarks, you can see an example below. As soon as you type in a single letter, the address bar will bring up a drop-down menu with things it believes you might be looking for. So, if your family members wanted to come to our site, and they push the letter "T", chances are fairly good that your "Top Teen Sex" bookmark would also pop up. No need to go into further detail than this.

I do find it interesting that of all things, this is what stops people from upgrading. But, on a shared PC, I guess the situation would be a little more complex than simply deleting your cookies/cache/history every time you're done surfing. For those users who held off upgrading, Firefox 3.5 pretty much takes care of that issue, as it allows you to turn off the advanced address bar quite easily.

The number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people’s bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. No fewer than 25% of Firefox 3 refuseniks cited this as the reason they wouldn’t upgrade. In fact, almost all of the people who provided feedback had tried Firefox 3, didn’t like what they saw, and headed back to Firefox 2.

Source: PC Pro​

 

[Doomsday]

i hate it when firefox wants to update and fails and starts bugging every time i start it! the bookmark thing is kinda weird, no privacy!

 

[Rory Buszka]

This is kind of a laugh (or rather more of a chuckle), but it wouldn't have been a problem if Mozilla had actually implemented private browsing in version 3. I'd hate to see them get rid of the bookmark drop-down, because I actually make use of it, but if private browsing were used, Firefox wouldn't store a record of that particular browsing session. Problem solved.

 

[Kougar]

Opera does the same things, if I type words into the address bar all of my bookmarks that match the word are shown below... I've grown to like the feature though.

JMke over at Madshrimps still uses Firefox 2.x, his reason was because it just loads and performs faster than the 3.x version according to him. That's the sole reason he refuses to update it, even though it means he is using a browser with plenty of unpatched, known, security holes.

 

[jmke]

JMke over at Madshrimps still uses Firefox 2.x, his reason was because it just loads and performs faster than the 3.x version according to him. That's the sole reason he refuses to update it,

Hey, don't take things out of context, just include the whole quote

not really no; tried it, was actually slower and more cumbersome than FF2 for what I use the browser.

in FF2 you can save account information per webpage and folder; in FF3 it becomes a site-wide only affair. So let's say I have password1 on the main site of techgage.com; I have password2 on techgage.com/securesite and password3 on techgage.com/editor

in FF3 it doesn't remember the password per subfolder, it will store the latest one used and you'll have to give in your credentials every time after that for the other subsites.

There's also less screen estate with FF3, but that's nitpicking, don't feel the need to upgrade my browser, same as I don't see the need to upgrade my OS (XP). The software does what I want it to do, I've checked out the newer version, didn't offer me enough incentive to upgrade, it actually reduced functionality;

now if there were a huge memory leak, security bug, etc in the software, with no means to stop it; there isn't much choice than the upgrade; but believe or not, if you visit decent sites you don't need the latest patches. For everything else there's Sandboxie

 

[Kougar]

Hey JMke! I was pretty sure you said somewhere that it was for speed reasons.... sorry that I apparently remembered wrong. Wasn't my intention to misquote you and I appreciate the correction/clarification.

 

[jmke]

pure speed wise (as in generating webpages) FF2 is slower, but if I take into account the downsides of the password storage, the overall experience with FF3 is slower

 

[Rob Williams]

in FF3 it doesn't remember the password per subfolder, it will store the latest one used and you'll have to give in your credentials every time after that for the other subsites.

Hmm, that's bizarre. I have credentials for our forums and CMS, both of which are on the Techgage.com domain, and my credentials are saved for both. I'm not sure if it matters, but one is a subdomain (the forums) and the other is techgage.com/something. Either way, that issue you describe would be maddening.

 

[jmke]

I'm running FF 3.5.2 on this machine and it has the same behavior, I've got a bunch of different subfolders, but with the SAME username but DIFFERENT passwords, the password management system in FF 2 can keep different passwords for different /subfolders with same username, in FF 3.x this functionality is MIA