Firefox 3 Beta 3

February 20th, 2008 by eyal | Filed under Techie. | Print This Post Print This Post

I’ve installed the new Firefox 3 Beta 3 today on my Mac, basically it’s a play area for me, I wasn’t going to risk my main FF on the PC. So far though it went reasonably smoothly. Profile was ported over successfully without any loss. Most extensions were disabled by the compatibility check however the Nightly Tester Tools took care of that, with the except of Tab Mix Plus which is one of the most important extensions I’m using. Another quick search and found a work-in-progress TMP dev build which solved that. The only extension where I see some issues so far is ScribeFire, it actually updated to a new version supposedly compatible with FF3 during the initial launch but it’s still having trouble remembering the password, fetching tags and with copy/paste.

Some early observations:

  1. FF3 is running faster than the previous FF2, everything seems more responsive.
  2. Smart Bookmarks feature is quite nice
  3. The address bar has a nice fetch-as-you-type-lookup-pulldown-quick-access feature :-)
  4. The updated theme is a lot nicer
  5. There’s a silly warning message when accessing about:config :-)
  6. There’s a new Plugins tab in the Addon section but it’s not quite clear how useful that’s going to be
  7. Lots of small tweaks here and there in the Preferences
  8. RSS icon in the location address bar doesn’t take me to a screen to add the site to Google Reader, not sure what’s up with that. Needs more digging around

And that’s pretty much it.

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3 Responses to “Firefox 3 Beta 3”

  1. Rick | 20/02/08

    Did they finally fix the shockwave compatability in FF3? That’s my biggest problem with Firefox–a bunch of Shockwave ads cause the browser to consume 99% of your system resources. I tried researching a solution but nobody seems to have a fix.

  2. eyal | 21/02/08

    Rick: I’ve not seen any shockwave issues in FF2.. I did have issues with loading of java applets, they would make the whole browser hang. That’s been solved and FF3 is responsive even while accessing/loading a page with a java applet in it.

  3. Rick | 21/02/08

    Cool, once it gets out of beta I’ll give it a try.

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