Will Firefox 3 hand the browser market to Chrome?

Like any good Open Source believer, I use Firefox. I'm a "late" early adopter, I like to use something once its been out in the market for 6 months or so (I've been through my guinea pig phase).

Anyway, this week I downloads Firefox 3 onto my laptop. Its a 3 year old Dell Latitude 400 machine on XP Pro, not top spec but has plenty of oomph still for what I need out and about (hmm - or maybe I do need a new one). The big desktop in the office does the serious heavy lifting (and game playing....)

Result - the system ground to a complete halt. Pages took longer to load than on dial-up days (5 minutes for this Blog Edit Page this am - that was the final straw).

Killed Firefox 3, went back into Internet Explorer and reloaded Firefox 2.0 - normal service is now resumed. Now, before y'all tell me that my computer can be upgraded, that there are help pages galore to help me speed up FF3, that I can tinker and disable and tune - let me just stop yous right there.

I don't care.

I ain't going to upgrade my machine - its a joe average machine compared to whats out there. Any successful package on the market today has to cater for a machine like this one or it will die.

Similarly, when I download something, I want it to work straight away, I don't want it bringing my computer to a grinding halt, and I especially don't want to faff around trying to search help groups for how to make the product work. If there are things I can disable, fine - but make it simple to find and do, not arcane. If its the only package that does the job, fine - I'll put the effort in. But web browsers are a competitive market. If this one's cr*p, hey, there are others

Now, I note that Firefox will withdraw support for version 2.0 in December 2008. I think thats a mistake, I think Firefox 3 is too big (or too bloated / inefficient) to run easily on many machines out there. They risk losing the market to Chrome (because its far more stripped down) and/or never getting the people moving over from IE. And the place you really really don't want to lose is the sweet spot of Windows users on - or interested in - Firefox, thats the big addressable market

Anyways, that my prediction for 2009 - Firefox 3 will lose Mozilla market share unless they can come up with a version or a download pack that loads cleanly and runs quickly on the average Windows machine out there.