I got the chance late in the evenings last week to try out the Firefox 3 beta 3.
http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/f.../releasenotes/
There are a couple of prominent items on the Known Bugs list, which mostly don't affect my browser useage, but it will affect some.
Most of those will likely be fixed by the time it comes out of beta. But it pays to know about them.
Visually there are only a couple of minor changes that greet the eye:
The back and forward buttons look different and the URL history list is under the forward button.
The site icons are enabled by default so the toolbar looks a whole lot better.
The tab-preview is switched off by default. Thank you!
Smart Bookmarks is like a Playlist with most recent and most popular.
(I have already found myself using that)
The intelligent url selection list that updates under the address bar is terrific.
(I don't have to go to a search engine page to find a url anymore).
There are other nice new features that will help enormously (when I get around to all of them).
I already appreciate the zoom-memory which is page specific.
Under the hood things are going very well.
I have not managed to crash it yet & yes I did try.
Where FF2 has previously locked up or shutdown without warning, I got not problem with FF3b3.
(all those FF reports we put in, about problem web pages, were being dealt with!)
Rendering seems to be quicker.
I do notice a slight difference in rendering sequence on some familiar pages so I expect that rendering sequences has been tweaked.
Monitoring the windows task manager shows that the CPU usage remains much lower than before. Excellent news.
Memory usage is about the same as FF2, if slightly less (5%).
The big improvement I am noticing is with pages that are heavily scripted.
This re-write seems to have been built to slice through them like warm butter.
The best thing is I now get a really snappy response with our Citrix connections.
(I back tested with IE and FF2 and they are still much slower - not sure how they achieved this but it is very welcome)
I haven't got on to the plug-ins or enhancements yet.
A Chatzilla updated rolled in today so I break that out for a test tomorrow.
Anyway...
Coming Soon: Mozilla Firefox 3.
I think you are going to like it. Lots.
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