Firefox 3 Beta 1 is a winner

Stan Beer
Thursday, 22 November 2007 08:51

Opinion and Analysis

Last night I downloaded the latest beta release from Mozilla, Firefox 3 Beta 1, meaning to just have a look-see so that I could pen a few impressions. Since then, I haven't bothered to load up Firefox 2 because, even though it's a pre-production test version, Firebox 3 Beta 1 is a mighty fine browser.

According to Mozilla's blurb: "Firefox 3 Beta 1 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 27 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 11,000 issues." That means little to me. All I'm interested in is performance, reliability, look and feel. And from what I've seen so far, Firefox 3 Beta 1 succeeds spectacularly in all areas.

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.