Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta

[engine]

A few months later than had been planned, Mozilla released on Monday night the first beta version of an overhauled Firefox, the widely used open-source Web browser.

Firefox 3 beta 1 includes a number of significant features that Mozilla said should improve security, ease of use, rendering of Web pages, and location of previously visited Web pages. And for the new era of rich Internet applications, the browser can run Web-based applications even when the computer is disconnected from a network.

The software is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux at Mozilla's download site in 20 different languages.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta [news.com]

[SEOMike]

Just downloaded and installed it. Man, it's fast. It absolutely smokes through loading pages. Not thrilled that my addons don't work, even the Google toolbar but oh well, not that big of a deal since it's a beta. I like what I see so far.

[mikedee]

If you are feeling brave then you can go to about:config and add a new key called extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false

Most old extensions should work, but obviously its going to vary.

I would recommend backing up your mozilla profile before doing anything drastic.

[300m]

crashed everytime i loaded it :(

I even tried it in safe mode with everything disabled.

[peterdaly]

Worked on the first 4 sites I tried. Yes, it felt VERY fast.

Site 5....hard drive started clicking...mouse wouldn't move...15 minutes later when I was finally able to get into the task manager...Firefox.exe...800MB ram and climbing.

I uninstalled, although a look very forward to a more stable release, the little taste I got was a good one.

[poppyrich]

It seems they've gone from a Text Zoom (just text) to an All Zoom (text and images) feature.

Any idea why not both depending upon the user's preference?

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Ah, it is a tad buggy.

[mikedee]

peterdaly : you should probably report that site to Mozilla if its causing problems. I have been using FF 3 for a few days now with no problems, but I suppose we all visit different sites ;)

kamikaze : I think thats why its called beta.

Personally I have not noticed a speed increase (except maybe when starting up), but I have a fast PC anyway. The bookmarking looks interesting (it auto bookmarks sites you visit regularly), but the new intelligent completion of the url does not work well for me.

[jonathanleger]

I love it so far. It fixed the horrible problem with FF2 that caused it to constantly grow in size until it finally crashed or I closed it down. It would eat up 800MB of my 1GB of RAM, and it never decreased in size, no matter how many FF browser windows I closed.

Now its RAM usage shrinks as you close windows, so that problem has not occurred again.

[XtendScott]

I have had it installed since the day it released,(the 19th I believe) and the only problems I have had are the add-ons not being "compatible".

It is definitely faster.

[civgroup]

Great to see it on the horizon. Not to temper the enthusiasm about its apparent speediness, but keep in mind that with no (or fewer) extensions, it should by default be faster than FF2 with all of your extensions loaded.

[Hester]

I've been using it for a few days and it seems good. There are plenty of little improvements here and there, like tooltips are no longer cut off. Plus you can now zoom in a whole page, not just the text. It even remembers the zoom setting per site - great touch!

[matimer]

Typing whatever without the .com brings up the .com ie [example...] brings up example.com was this around before this version?