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Firefox 3 Beta 1 available
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 23rd November 2007
Firefox 3 is getting good reviews. Fast load times, lower memory usage, and new features are topping reviewers' lists.
Wired noted that Firefox 3 brings noticeably faster pages loads and managed to stay below 60MB of memory usage. That's a huge improvement from the 80 to several hundred MB memory footprint that Firefox 2 takes up. When the browser was running in the background, it completely disappeared from their CPU usage monitor - but keep in mind that they were running the beta on an Intel Mac with Mac OS X Leopard.
Ars Technica was impressed with the large amount of new features in the web browser. One of the new features that Ars seems to really love is the Places system. Places is a new way of storing your bookmarks and history information. Users have the ability to now tag bookmarks and also search all places websites in specific ways. One way would be to search your bookmarks by a minimum number of visits.
There is a lot more to Places than that. In fact, there are simply too many features and capabilities in Places for me to cover alone, so I'm going to direct you over to the Mozilla Wiki for more info.
iTWire also had good things to say about the performance of the browser. Stan Beer simply wanted to pen a light review of the browser, but has ended up not opening Firefox 2 since. He noticed an improvement to page loads, just as Wired had, and liked that Mozilla didn't change the interface much. Keeps things simpler, y'see?
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from over at ZDNet did a memory comparison to Firefox 2.0.0.9 and found that, under greater loads, Firefox 3 kept a much smaller memory footprint than 2.0.0.9. Just out of curiosity, he loaded up Internet Explorer 7 to the same web pages he used in the test and found that it used more memory than Firefox 3.
So, needless to say, it is looking really good for Firefox fans. It seems that just about everyone who has used the beta has noticed a page load speed increase along with a smaller system footprint. If you're wanting to give it a test, just make sure you back up your current configurations. After all, this is still a beta and could still wipe out all of your precious browser data.
Have you installed Firefox 3 already? What are your thoughts on it? Tell us your impressions over in the forums.
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Comments (35)
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As with places, I cant honestly see myself using it much as I rarely bookmark anyway, I tend to remember URL's.
I'll have to live without some addons until they're updated, but it's all good.
Faster Firefox without any nasty hacks. Top stuff!
Edit: I see what you mean BioSniper, that's not good news.
Yeah, sadly it does. The Web Developer bar, I would imagine, will be updated pretty sharpish. *crosses fingers*
Beta 1 was ok nothing too special. Pages were faster loading.
Or check out the 9.5 beta released weeks ago which contains pretty much all the features implemented better and a faster renderer and better memory usage.
I used to use that to save quick posts on these forums and others and now I can't.
Reeeeally irritating. :(
and omg, as i type this, its spotting mistakes! winner.
you can turn this off with one of the options in about:config
try googling it
i didnt upgrade to FF2 until i worked out how to fix this issue :p
Ha, I've just installed it and sent of two bug reports already. One was cos I was messing about with the default programmes thing in the options and the other was i tried to do my "new tab gesture" forgetting all-in-one gestures wasn't installed, it didn't like either of them.
My thoughts on the new FF are:
Yea! less memory usage
Ooo pretty new star
Boo, my add ons dont work
Overall, I wont be a tester, no matter how frequently i can generate bug reports I'm not using the new FF until 80% of my add-ons work. I supposed I could get my friend to teach me how to edit the .xpi's again and change all the version numbers, but it just seems like too much hassle.
@Jipa: you wont have written over the old FF, it installed it into a separate directory so just use your old FF link or hotkey and viola FF2
That is so awesome. No more are pictures dull or misdisplayed. I'm very happy so far :) Now there's both Safari and Firefox supporting color profiles. I guess IE is the last one sitting on their fingers ;)
as usual lol, so far im quite impressed and the speed boost is very noticeable on a crap dialup connection
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Fireforx 2 does that
imo its the one thing i havent like as much as ff2, the first two things are minor... dl time in minutes doesnt convert it to hours and minutes, (probalbe fixable), the clear up buttons gone (just right click and its in the listbox) but it supposed to have better pausing features that pauses fine but wont restart at all
damn right. I dropped firefox about a year ago after a friend reccomended Opera to me.
I agree, opera, in most other ways is superior, however, firefox still rapes opera in terms of extensions
Plus, Opera supports Greasemonkey natively, as well as it's widgets, quite a few of the fx extensions can be shrunken down into JS.
Or you could get the Google browser sync extension and use FF
Downloading soon, especially as my FF2 keeps crashing :(
<A88>
Anyways... the first big difference I noticed was that FF 3 does NOT run in admin mode under Vista... no "yes, run FF and stop asking me, stupid!" dialog anymore. Definitely a good thing. :)
And it's faster.