I’ve been at the airport and on a flight home for the most of the day and missed most of the Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta buzz. Now that I’ve had a chance to glance over it, I must say I’m optimistic about where Firefox is going. Firefox 3 seems to be addressing the user experience more than anything else. There’s a better download manager, one-click bookmarking (stars), better security, patched memory leaks (or so it has been claimed) and everything else you might expect from the big M.
ArsTechnica has a thorough post highlighting some of Firefox 3 Beta’s new features. You can give Firefox 3 Beta a go and download it from Mozilla’s developer site.
Firefox 3 Beta: Yes or No?
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I’m excited about the new version, but uninstalled it within about an hour, after seeing the most horrendous rendering issues with the web app I’m currently working on. This app renders in Opera, Safari, FF 2, IE 6 & 7, etc. But in FF 3 Beta 1 it looked absolutely atrocious, with many parts of the screen looking like scanline vomit.
Other than that, performance was great, and the user experience was pretty smooth, so I’m looking forward to the final version.
I think i will continue to use safari 3. at least until i see something in firefox that makes it worth it to switch back over.
Betas are always painful. :)
i love firefox, i’m just testing this beta seems to be nicer has other aspect, i testing
I think that Firefox 3 is turning out very well, although there are a few things that could still be improved upon. The integration into the OS is doing very well, and there is a snapshot of the current theme for Mac OS X up on Firefox Add-Ons (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6050), although it does need a little work itself. Overall Firefox 3 is shaping up to be a great release.
Since Leopard was released, I switched back to Firefox. It (even FF2) seems to run so much better now. With the lateset FF3 beta and the proto theme (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6050).. I’m very happy. No fans running, low memory usage, fast rendering, and extensions :).
Yep too early…
Deleted my bookmarks. They have to figure out smoother upgrades
Paul, just found your site the other day…well done, sir.
Haven’t got a chance to play with Beta 3 yet, but looks promising. I should have some time to play this weekend.
Firefox 3 is no doubt a step ahead. I have already tried it and am impressed with the beta.
I’ve read somewhere (I think it was over at TechCrunch) that they still have issues with memory leakes – or at least ultra-high memory usage. As far as this isn’t fixed, I’ll stick to Safari 3 on my shiny new MacBook.
I’ve only recently switched to using Firefox. I’ve always used Safari and love how it looks. The only problem is their are a lot of tools that aren’t compatible with Safari.
Firefox 3 Beta does look pretty slick though. It looks they are starting to design with more of a sense of style.
Firefox 3 = Yes
Yes.
Speeds are faster on OS X, so that’s all I need. Gecko isn’t exactly blazing right now and losing out quick to Safari 3, so this is gonna be good.
Everything else minor to me.
Dimitry
I tested it, and I really liked the new Firefox.
@Abhishek: deleted your bookmarks or didn’t import them?, anyway, I didn’t have any problem, it took all my bookmarks perfectly.
And I agree: it’s clearly faster on Mac, we’ll see if the memory problems are solved in some time.
It looks great.
It just doesn’t feel natural to me, which keeps bugging me. I don’t care about all the web development features in my everyday surfing. So I’ll stick with Safari 3 for my usual web browsing…
It can’t get any worse than FF 2.0 on the Mac, right?! ;)
just downloaded and it flows well thus far. I’m still a big fan of safari though!
FF3b1 works great so far; only found 3 or 4 small bugs. I like it.
I don’t think it will replace Safari for me. I used to be a FF follower but now I’m a Safari addict.
I jumped on it yesterday and haven’t noticed any issues yet. There’s promise yet!
Err….I think I am an oddball here, being an FF user on Windows. Here goes my 2 cents:
It is much more pleasing visually, even the default skin. Also, the download manager looks slick.
I’ve switched back to v2 for now, coz most extensions don’t work, and I can’t use FF without them (which is the only reason for not switching to Opera).
I don’t see too many differences so far that make it worth while.
One issue I would have hoped they’d fix, is how Firefox handles printing frames (specifically, printing an email from OWA).
Most of my users at work are using OWA with Firefox on Macs to view and send email, and somewhere along the line, it happened that printing an email only prints the first page, unless you choose the Firefox settings from the print window and tell it to print the current frame only.
Saving as a PDF behaves the same way.
It’s annoying as anything, and I still get multiple emails and calls every week about it, even after sending out instructions, so I hope they’ll address this before it’s officially released.
I thought it was taken care of in the Gran Paradiso alpha build a week or two ago, but I guess not.
Anyone have any suggestions?
@Banyu
It did not import my bookmarks. I had to switch back to 2.X version.
I might try a manual export/import between the two versions.
Abhishek
I have to admit that when Mr Jobs at WWDC ‘07 said he wanted Safari to replace Firefox as the browser of choice I was sceptical. But here I am not using Camino or Firefox for anything except Amazon Market place, (Amazon’s fault, I’ve reported the bug).
Firefox 3 seemed faster than I remembered it before, but it feels floated and ‘un-mac like’. I know its only a first beta, and yes maybe when Camino copies over the improvements into their next few releases I’ll see something to take my fancy, but not anytime soon.
Darn, it deleted all my bookmarks, all my plug-ins and also ended up crashing.. I think ill wait for the official release candidate until i try upgrading.
It couldn’t be looking worse on Windows. The download list window is insanely ugly.
Hey Paul,
Will The memory leak / usage be fixed in FF3 ?
I notice a lot of improvement in the beta interms of response time
the bookmarking feature is good
I haven’t tried this on my Mac yet, however I have tried it on Windows. I must admit its looking good, although I’m finding page rendering to be monumentally slow, has anyone else experienced this on Windows?
I suppose it is beta so this is to be expected.
New to Mac. Looking for as much info as possible. Is this browser (FF) available to all or do you need to be on a list to test the beta? If it is available, please send info. Safari has been closing on me often, especially when I use myspace.com.
So, moving back to firefox? :)
@Quahim: Firefox 3 beta is public! Google it and you will find a link for downloading!
what the different with firefox 2.0.11 ???