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Our Blogs The BeerFiles Firefox 3 Beta 1 is a winner
Our Blogs The BeerFiles Firefox 3 Beta 1 is a winner | Firefox 3 Beta 1 is a winner |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Thursday, 22 November 2007 | |
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Upon loading the new beta release for the first time, one thing that impressed me, aside from its blinding speed, was that Mozilla has not attempted to fiddle with the look and feel of the interface. There are changes to be sure, but if you weren't looking for them, you could easily believe you were running the previous version. However, the differences are there, such as the one click "bookmark this page" star icon in the location bar, the download manager in the tools menu, the site identification icon also in the location bar, the ability to save tabs (very handy when you need to quit Firefox), the ability to add tags to bookmarks for later sorting, page zooming and many more new features. According to Mozilla, Firefox 3 Beta 1 also has a number of enhanced security features such as integration with anti-virus packages, sand-boxing of suspected web forgery pages and, for Vista users, integration with that operating systems parental control settings for disabling downloads. Clearly, this pre-release isn't quite ready for prime time as it is not yet integrated with many of the plug-ins that work with the previous version. However, Flash certainly works because I downloaded it. So far, I haven't experienced any stability problems, haven't run up against any sites yet where I can't do anything that I should be able to do and boy is this one fast mother of a browser. According to iTWire site stats, almost exactly 50% of our readers use Firefox 2 and a further 2% are already using Firefox 3 Beta 1. By comparison, Microsoft IE7 has about 19% share of our readers, while IE6 has almost 17%, indicating a reluctance among IE users to upgrade to the latest version of that browser, which has been available for more than a year. As far as I'm concerned, once they catch a glimpse of Firefox 3 Beta 1, Mozilla may have a hard time holding users back from upgrading before it's officially released. This browser is a winner.
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  written by Sridhar Dhanapalan, November 22, 2007
Which OS did you test on, Stan? I'm asking since many Linux users blame the Mozilla Corporation for treating their OS as an afterthought. It would be wonderful news for us if your positive comments here applied to the Linux version.
written by stan, November 22, 2007
I'm sorry but I've only tested it on Vista so far. I plan to give Kubuntu a try tonight. My experience with the Firefox 2 has unfortunately been that it runs slower on Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I'll be interested to see how FF3 Beta 1 performs.
written by Mark P., November 23, 2007
I second the request for an Ubuntu or any Linux test!
written by Peterix, November 23, 2007
I'm running Firefox 3 alpha (that´s what I found in the Ubuntu repos)
There's a nice visual refresh on the way so Firefox looks pretty much like a part of the system now. There's still a few visual glitches but it looks well overall. Also, Javascript no longer slows the browser to a crawl, so I can confirm that there's the same speedup on Linux - maybe even greater because the Linux version of Firefox 2 was slower than the Windows one. Now it's so fast I can't spot the difference. written by MrS, November 23, 2007
I've been running the firefox nightly builds on linux for the past month. I'm pleased to report that it now uses your gtk engine's controls for form widgets. No longer are we stuck with the messy widget replacement hacks or ugly, boxy buttons. Additionally, they're working a new Tango theme for the Linux 3.0 final.
written by nolihc, November 23, 2007
Some problems with the search field, you can search only once then it freezes.
written by Jst4Fun, November 23, 2007
I am currently running firefox 3 on fedora and it is stable enough for prime time use. It also loads and works faster than the previous version.
written by Aliov, November 23, 2007
I've tested firefox 3 on Ubuntu as well as OpenSuSE and this new version seems to be very stable and fast .
written by paulw, November 23, 2007
I am a Safari user, but I am giving Firefox another look since the new beta. I like what I see, the new prototype mac theme is very safari like. Also the Memory consumption issue seems to be solved. There a few minor things that need work, but they will be fixed i am sure. So far very stable for a beta.
written by Joshua Harris, November 23, 2007
It may not be that they won't upgrade, it's that they can't. Win 2000 users can't upgrade to IE 7. Thankfully I don't care because I use Firefox. I'm planning on downloading FF v3.1b as a separate install soon.
written by xenu, November 24, 2007
with all those pirated copies of xp out there, there are also a lot of people not able to upgrade to ie6 :D
written by Stu, November 24, 2007
I tried the beta1 on my pentium3-opensuse10.3 and it would gobble up about 500 mb ram and 80% cpu after sitting at the homepage for 10-15 seconds. Same thing after mv'ing .mozilla to .mozilla.bak and letting it build it's own ~dir. But I guess that's why they call it beta. I'm still planning on upgrading when the official release comes out. I've never experienced any of the "memory leak" problems I've heard about on this old hardware, using firefox since the first release.
written by Shaun Rosten, November 24, 2007
And had to uninstall immediately. Within 2 minutes of use the browser would eat up my memory to 800meg usage. I'm a huge firefox fan, but that is unacceptable. I don't know why it does that, nor how to fix it. But it is a beta, so I can only hope it's fixed by actual release. BTW this is on Windows XP SP2. But it seems to be the same problem as the openSuSe user above me. Haha, just read his post further, and yeah I've NEVER had any memory problems with previous releases before either, strange it starts now when most people have experienced better memory usage.
written by Anonemyeouse, November 24, 2007
Not only is the memory hole not fixed yet, it's worse. I had it hit 300,000k in a matter of minutes!
They still have a long way to go. I don't care how many extra bells and whistles they throw on to this thing, if they don't fix the memory hole, none of those fancy window dressings will matter. written by Krishnan, November 24, 2007
/Quote
with all those pirated copies of xp out there, there are also a lot of people not able to upgrade to ie6 End Quote/ I think XP comes with IE7. written by John Atkeson, November 26, 2007
1 one click "bookmark this page" star icon in the location bar,
2 ability to save tabs (very handy when you need to quit Firefox), 3 ability to add tags to bookmarks for later sorting, 4 page zooming EVERY ONE of these features is already in Firefox 2. What is he talking about? written by Troy, December 28, 2007
/quote John
EVERY ONE of these features is already in Firefox 2. What is he talking about? end quote John/ /quote Shaun What? No they aren't... end quote Shaun/ All of the features listed by John are available in ff2 as addons, but they are not an integral part of the program. It would be a little dumb for the programmers not to merge the features of the most popular addons. Tell us what you think! better to paste your comment - this page will refresh every 15 minutes
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