I’ve become annoyed over recent months with Firefox. I had installed version 3, and to be honest its stability and speed were becoming worse and worse. I had even installed Safari as a backup because of Firefox’s tendency to crash on many sites.

This evening Firefox finally gave up the ghost. It crashed out, and even when trying to reboot it in safe mode, I was stuck with an annoying issue reporting tool that itself didn’t work. One thing I desperately needed was the bookmarks file, otherwise I would have just gone straight over to Safari and never looked back. Except that Firefox keeps the damn things well hidden.

Reluctantly I went to Firefox’s website and decided to try one last ditch effort: reinstall over itself and hope that the broken bits get fixed enough for it to work without trashing the bookmarks. Well, They’re up to version 3.5.3 now, and I gave it a go. Imagine my surprise when a software install to fix something actually worked with no teeth gnashing, no hassle, and just worked. Well, it did. I’m back up and running with a browser which has retained all of my preferences and personal settings from before, but which actually runs quickly and without instability.

Result – for a change.