Aside from complaining others complained too much about Firefox 3...

I was somewhat surprised to see that the search plugins in FF3 are now also in a sqlite database (you can use a technology too much - is a database really appropriate here? Write rarely, read often, small XML files?).

Now I need to figure out how to import my Opensearch XML file into Sqlite (or how to host my custom search engine nicely just to import one search engine). Previously I could just copy the XML file into the relevant directory, and restart Firefox.

I need to import this because my home directory is on NFS, and something glitched, and my old profile then found itself incapable of using the disk as a cache (recreating the "Cache" directory didn't help here).

I'm think Firefox's decision to use sqlite was a mistake or possibly just poorly executed, that may have made it impractical in almost all set ups where user home directories are mounted (CIFS or NFS), which is a lot of corporate environments. Certainly they need to think about recovery and locking with sqlite more, blowing away, or manually recovering a profile backup every time something goes wrong is going to be exceedingly tedious - guess I can write a wrapper script for Firefox to do it for me but this isn't the Tao of software route.

I've abandoned trying to persuade it to use a local disk for Cache at the moment - which ought to help performance slightly - although hopefully most of the Cache is in buffer cache most of the time. Possibly local caching here is actually slower than using the local Squid proxy, but in that path through the code it renders the alt text before fetching the graphics (yuk). No doubt some obscure rendering parameter may help here.

Epiphany looks suddenly so attractive, and is so much faster on GNOME.