Firefox 3 Beta 4 - A Mini Review

With IE8 Beta 1 finally getting out the door at Mix08 last week I figured I’d check on the competition and spark up FF3 Beta 4. Here’s a quick summary of what’s new (from a visible perspective)

1. Speed – it’s sooo much quicker to use. You’ll notice the difference in ajax heavy apps (google reader, etc) as well as in general rendering.

2. Downloads now get virus checked. Nice.

3. New address bar – very funky. Not only address search, but titles as well


4. Most FF2 add-ons don’t work. You’ll need to find updates. Here’s Firebug 1.1 beta (FireFtp has a beta you can get as well)

You can see the parallel loading has increased to 6-7 items instead of 2, which explains some of the speed boost. 5. Bookmarking is a little different – note the tagging. Very cool.
6. IE8 Activities work and are available from hereAdding activities from the IE8 activity gallery works, but Mitch’s Wikipedia activity doesn’t due to the use of IE8 specific javascript. Even so...
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7. IE8 style Webslices can be got from here. but they’re still halfbaked (it’s obviously a quick hack and more work is needed)

When you try to mouse over the icon so you can add it, it disappears because you've left the webslice (doh!). I’m sure there’ll be an update soon enough, but in the meantime you can right-click to add a “webchunk” which then looks like this: Oh- before you make any comments on the content this is all legit ebay search results and all stemmed from the selection on the SMH web site. 8. Oh - it does occasionally crash L But at least the crash reporting is OK, and when you restart you can try and restore your sessions which is OK (unless the offending page always causes the crash).
Overall– a really good experience, but being beta I’d expect that there are still issues with it I haven’t seen in the short time I’ve used it. Is it better than IE8? Some people think so - here.

If you want to try firefox 3 beta, you can download it here

Posted by Richard Banks

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