Flashes of Panic

Along with a few zillion other people, I downloaded Firefox 3.0 last night, and installed it this morning. Much as I like Firefox, however, I have to admit a little bit of buyer’s remorse about the upgrade.

The primary driver of this, of course, has nothing to do with the Mozilla Foundation themselves, or at least, not directly. The problem is that I’ve become quite fond of a certain constellation of extensions (or “Add-ons” as the Firefox crew are now calling them), and the jump up to 3.0 has made some of them non-functional and others… wonky.

The “Wonky” includes ForecastFox, which is working fine but has odd white gaps between the icons with Firefox’s new shiny Mac chrome. (Oh, hey, the Mac-native Firefox now uses Mac-type buttons, after about three years of whining.) The outright non-functional include Dust-Me Selectors, a surprisingly useful tool which checks a site’s CSS and provides a list of style rules which are never actually used on the site, and Firebug.

It’s the busted Firebug which is really a deal-breaker for me. In the last year I’ve become so accustomed to figuring out and fixing layout and style issues on a page with Firebug that I’m actually a little disturbed to be going without it. Fortunately, I still have a 2.x Bon Echo build kicking around which I can run if a 3.x compatible Firebug isn’t released before I have need for it again. (They appear to be relatively close.)

Update: I’ve installed a beta of the next version of Firebug, which they had targeted for 3.x compatibility. Discussion on their end makes it sound like Firefox was a bit of a moving target for them.