As I noticed in the current trunk build of Firefox 3.0 beta3 the developers decided to change the behavior of the “go to”-button, the green one in the location bar. While it was always there and clickable in Firefox 2, it’s now only visible when you’re editing the URL. When you’re just viewing a page it’s gone.
Why is this a problem? What’s the use of it anyway?
Well, considering myself a semi-poweruser, I, of course, do not click the goto-button for visiting pages after entering the URL — at least not since the late nineties.
I use (or used) the goto-button to refresh a page I’m currently on. But there’s the reload-button for that! I hear you screaming. Right, BUT: Reload and goto make a difference in how Firefox handles its cache. I don’t know exactly how, as the page’s content is updated in both cases, but it seems Firefox ignores linked content like images, CSS files etc. when the goto is used.
To compare and validate the felt difference I installed YSlow (for Firefox 2.0.0.11 — it’s not available for Firefox 3, yet). Here are the loading times of the German tech-news site heise online, first using the goto-button then the proper reload:
My plea to the Firefox devs: Either…
- give us the old behavoir back and show the goto-button permanently.
- or offer an option in
about:configto choose. - or fix the reload-button to offer “fast-reloading”, too. Maybe F5 = fast reload, Ctrl-F5 = full reload as it’s in IE IIRC.
Thank you.
PS: Other than that Firefox 3 really rocks. Even in beta and with unauthorized addons it’s more stable than 2.0.0.x :)
Fabian Neumann