In lieu of yet another Mozilla Firefox 3 review (there are thousands out there if you want) and instead of encouraging you to download it (I’m sure I would’ve been preaching to the choir here), I’ll just give my first-time impressions of the latest version of the browser that I’ve come to love. (If you’re curious about this article’s title, you should check out my blog posts for Firefox 2 and Firefox 1. Hehehe.)

It’s a good thing that I slept last night instead of waiting for 1 a.m. to download Firefox 3. Apparently, the release got delayed to 11:16 a.m. PDT (San Francisco time) (2:16 a.m. Philippine time) as over-enthusiastic fans piled on Mozilla’s server as the original 10 a.m. PDT release time drew near. After I woke up a several hours ago, I downloaded and installed Firefox 3, thus joining the more than 2.6 million people that have already downloaded Firefox 3 today to help set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

The installation was pretty painless—I was done in less than a minute. Upon opening Firefox 3 for the first time, it helpfully let me upgrade two of the three add-ons I have that were incompatible. Unfortunately, the vital Firebug extension (a must for web developers!) currently has no compatible version for Firefox 3. Boo! Good thing that I’m not doing any web developing at the moment and in case I need it, the Web Developer toolbar extension still works!

Browsing around with Firefox 3, visiting various websites and AJAX-y ones like Gmail and Plurk, I found the browser to be quite fast and snappy and so far a vast improvement performance-wise over Firefox 2. On the other hand, my first experience with the much-hyped Awesome Bar (i.e., the location bar) was less than stellar; I’ve gotten used to typing ’g’, pressing down and then the return key to get to Gmail (and doing similar for other sites) that not getting that behavior in Firefox 3 was extremely jarring. I guess I have to “retrain” Firefox 3 from scratch to make the Awesome Bar live up to its name.

The interesting keyhole-shaped Back and Forward buttons (which I believe is a good user interface element) only appears when you customize the main toolbar to the default setting of “Icons.” I set mine in Firefox 2 to “Small icons” and so in Firefox 3 it was not the keyhole shape but was a swivel double button instead. Also, if you select the “Icons with text” option, the Back and Forward buttons become separate. Well, that’s just a random tidbit in case you don’t see the characteristic keyhole-shaped buttons of Firefox 3.

I must say that I’ve gone from early adopter to mainstream consumer with regards to Firefox. I first started using this browser back when it was still called Phoenix 0.3. I could’ve tried the various beta and release candidate versions of Firefox 3 that came up over the last several months but I refrained from doing so because Firefox has become such a vital application for me that I now prefer getting very stable releases. Oh well, that’s how things go.

That’s it for now for my first impressions. I’ll probably highlight some neat things I see (or rants) about Firefox 3 on my Plurk profile. How about you, how do you find Firefox 3 so far?