The nightly channel was on 9 last time I checked and it had a much better OS X UI, the first time some put effort into cleaning it up since FF4. I really wish they would get that into the release channel.
It couldn't have taken you years. Firefox 4 was only released in March of this year. Firefox 5 came three months later in June. Firefox 6 was two months later in August, and Firefox 7 now comes a little over a month afterwards.
I'm a great believer in that. However, bugs have been fixed, memory leaks plugged, rendering times improved. Personally the promise of more effcicient memory use has me chomping at the bit - FF runs like molasses on my 768MB Athlon 1.1GHz.
Sure it could. Firefox 3.0 was released in June 2008, 3.5 in June 2009 and 3.6 January 2010. If he just upgraded then he could have been on Firefox 3.x for over 3 years.
I'm curious what you use Javascript in the URL bar for?
It's been used as a security hole: A large-ish number of Facebook/etc phishing scams have had people copy javascript into their address bar.
For technical users, it's a pretty bad interface for writing and testing javascript.
Check out the Web Console or Scratchpad under the Web Developer Tools menu instead. It's really a much nicer way to run some impromptu javascript on a page.
"Open the developer tools and paste this into the JavaScript Console" is far less effective as "paste this into your address bar" as far as phishing schemes go. At least, in my experience. YMMV.
When you select (copy) the URL it silently adds 'http:// to it. You will see only when you paste it. I'm not sure I really like the concept of silently putting stuff in my selection buffer. I'm going to disable this.
Chrome does it so they can iterate on new features more rapidly. Firefox is now using the same model because it is the most sensible way to produce software.
All my plugins work, nothing to report. Perhaps you could contact your addons' developer to see if they are going to upgrade them. During the years I learnt to distinguish which addons I really need, while I uninstalled the others, making Firefox a lot faster to load and run. Honestly, many addons are not vital and I can happily live without them.
Also, there's a new feature of having a "retro" feel in OS X Lion: visible scrollbars and lack (Lion) of gestures.
Further more, why do I need to restart my browser to install an extension in this day and age and why didn't it auto update instead of it bitching and forcing me to download it manually?
Question: Did you try the Compatibility Reporter[1] yet?
I'd wager that 95% of all addons will work without problems with version checks disabled - and I'm using the Nightlies. The only one so far that didn't work correctly since a while is Tree Style Tabs, which I assume is due to the fact that it heavily modifies the interface.
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast/
I would request a fix but I can't find a contact on that page and I don't feel like creating another account for their bugfix system right now.