The Firefox 3 release is out, and... it's awful. I suppose Linux and Windows users don't notice this, they probably think it's great, because they have no taste. To a Mac user, it's repulsive and dysfunctional.

1. I will give them this: it's a proper DMG without an installer, just drag the Firefox.app into your Applications folder, or wherever you want it. This concludes the positive items of this "review".
2. Even launching FF3 sucks: FF icon appears and bounces, then vanishes from the Dock, then a new FF icon appears and bounces, and after a second bounce it comes up. Ah. Upon further experimentation, it seems that if you switch between FF versions, it does this. Since I'm a web developer by day, I'm going to be going through this a lot. HATE.
3. The obvious first thing about the window is the "Evil Eye" back/forward buttons, which are just creepy. Make it stop leering at me! HATE.
4. Unlike a real Mac app, right-clicking on these buttons doesn't give you the customize toolar menu. It just does nothing, if you don't have a history. Clicking on other buttons does work. HATE. When you find the customize panel, you can use small icons, and the buttons look less insane.
5. Dragging the gray gradient "metal" parts of the interface on any modern Mac app will drag the entire window. This works in all of Apple's apps, and most 3rd-party Mac apps. It's a free behavior in metal apps created with Xcode. However, this isn't a real Mac app, it's an empty window painted entirely by Firefox. So dragging the window around doesn't work when you expect it to. It has a smoothed single menu bar/toolbar look, but only the Apple-controlled menu bar actually lets you drag. HATE.
6. Right-clicking on text to look something up in Dictionary or Spotlight doesn't work right. None of my Services menu options work; in particular, I use BBEdit's "New Window with Selection" and Mail's "Send Selection" items several times an hour. These features don't work, because Mozilla aren't using the real Mac text components, and didn't bother to finish the OS integration. HATE.
7. In Safari, Cmd-1 through Cmd-9 activate the first 9 toolbar bookmarks, presumably the ones you use the most. I use that constantly (I have them labelled 1 gmail, 2 Twitter, 3 GNews, etc.)... There's no equivalent in Firefox. HATE.
8. The form controls are grossly broken and wrong on the Mac. They look like crap, and don't behave like real Mac controls. HATE.
9. I don't even want to get too far into performance. On a Flash-heavy, JS-heavy site, FF is currently using 97% CPU, Safari 37%. Both around 120MB RAM. Haven't done any long-term performance/memory testing, but I would expect Safari to continue being massively faster while using less CPU power. Speed isn't just in a number-cruncher's interest, it's a key part of making an app responsive. Every new release of Apple software is faster than the previous, while every new release of Mozilla software is slower. HATE.
10. [update 2008-06-20] Dragging a bookmark out of the bookmark bar doesn't destroy it in a puff of smoke, like dragging things out of the Dock, or Safari's bookmark bar, or any toolbar in Mac OS X. HATE.

The whole thing is typical of everything Mozilla does. Left to themselves, they make ugly, unusable trash. If the users complain enough (like about not matching the Leopard light bg/dark fg theme), they can copy how something looks, but they're utterly incompetent at copying how it works, and the only user testing they do is with autistic Linux nerds. We already knew this, of course. Look at Bugzilla, and you'll quickly discover that user experience is job 65535.

Sadly, I have to test my work on Firefox before release, though I use Safari for most of my work. I would never survive using Firefox as my real browser now.

I wasn't this negative about previous versions. I used to LIKE Firefox. It was probably just as bad as the current version, but that was before Safari showed us how a browser could not suck.