Firefox 3 vs 2

[Khamsin]

I remember when FF3 came out, people were disappointed and it had some shortcomings (possibly plugin-compatibility related?) that made FF2 better at the time.

What were those shortcomings, and is FF2 still better?

[Cephius]

The main problem was that it was a memory hog and that not all plugins were compatible with it. Those issues have since gone away, I've been using FF3 since release and haven't had a problem.

[Cutriss]

Some people just didn't like the Awesome Bar. I love it. I just type 'adv' in it and I've already got a link to BG/Advanced.

I don't use a huge amount of extensions, just Distrust, NoScript, IE Tab, and ForecastFox. All work in FF3 now.

FF2 I believe is now officially unsupported, meaning that no official updates will come from Mozilla for it. People might still incorporate patches into the regular builds but it won't have new formal releases.

[Kiarax]

Some people just didn't like the Awesome Bar. I love it. I just type 'adv' in it and I've already got a link to BG/Advanced.

I don't use a huge amount of extensions, just Distrust, NoScript, IE Tab, and ForecastFox. All work in FF3 now.

FF2 I believe is now officially unsupported, meaning that no official updates will come from Mozilla for it. People might still incorporate patches into the regular builds but it won't have new formal releases.

They've released either 3 or 4 new patches since they first said they weren't supporting it any more. So I wouldn't take that for granite. When it came out I remember it not letting you middleclick the "Go" button to open another copy of the page in a new tab (well, the Go button actually dissapeared unless you edited the URL, so the only way around it was to just type a random key, delete it and then hit Go), I usually use this is a way to refresh the page to check nobody has responded before I use quick reply.

[Pikarya]

Awesomebar needs an option to be removed through settings.

[Shuemue]

I've been using FF3 since release and haven't had a problem.

this

[Spekkio]

Don't think the Firefox 3 "awesome bar" is awesome? Here's how to disable it. - Download Squad
follow these directions to disable the awesome bar.
most problems with ff3 that i'd noticed are resolved and even if they're still patching ff2, many plugins may have dropped support for ff2 because of that. i really can't think of any good reasons to stick around on ff2 over ff3 for 99% of users.

[Pikarya]

^ I've tried about every guide/mod to remove it completely. In some aspect, I still sometimes get a blank awesome bar suggestion box. But yeah, I've tried everything and it hasn't removed the damned thing completely lol.

[Kohan]

Even in the beginning, many of the so-called "issues" which Firefox 3 suffered from were overblown. This is a quite technical explanation, but it gets into their optimization of its memory usage:

Firefox 3 Memory Usage

Though Firefox 3 may allocate a larger amount of memory to itself, it uses it much more efficiently than Firefox 2 did. Considering, it may seem to hog more memory, but in truth, it doesn't. It's also missing countless amounts of leaks that plagued its predecessor.

As others have mentioned, there's really no reason to stick with Firefox 2.

[avelle]

Sounds like it's time to upgrade.

[The_OG_Nelta]

I love my FF2 ._.;

[Epical]

I used FF2 well after FF3 was released because of the problems already mentioned, and mainly for the plugin in compatibility. Recently they officially stopped supporting it, and that's what convinced me to finally upgrade to FF3. With the exception of one of my oft-used plugins no longer being compatible, I have no regrets. In fact, I prefer FF3 over FF2 any day (and I was a pretty big FF2 fanboy).

[Blabj]

Firefox 3.1b2 user here, only for the mac gestures. They are <3.