Firefox 3 is about to hit Release Candidate 1 any day now, and beta 5 is supposed to be pretty stable now, and since it can co-exist with Firefox 2 on Windows (not on OS X or Linux, mind) I thought I’d give it a try. And hey, it’s pretty damn cool.
Outwardly when static you won’t notice a great deal of difference - the back / forward buttons are a little more compact, the icons are a little flashier in places and you have quite cool things like one-click bookmarking on the location bar (the little star icon - it’s gold when you’re on a bookmarked page already, outlined when you’re not), but otherwise just feels like Firefox 2, which is no bad thing. Where you will notice the difference is in the speed - I found the new version to be a bit faster with general web browsing, and much faster when dealing with AJAX-heavy sites like GMail or Analytics. Given that’s the way things are going for most sites these days, I’m not surprised they’ve concentrated on streamlining that element of it.
Seems pretty stable to me, the only thing that stops me using it right now is that there is no updated version of Google Browser Sync for it yet, one of my 3 ‘essential’ plugins, the other two being FlashGot and Web Developer, which do work with the new version. Once that’s updated, which I guess will be fairly soon now that FF3 is emerging from beta, I’ll definitely be upgrading.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:08 am
If you like Web Developer, you’ll probably also like FireBug. http://www.getfirebug.com/ I’ve found it to be immensely useful when doing web development.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:31 am
Firebug, Scrapbook, Brief(or Sage) and Adblock are my ‘essential’ extensions. Also, you should trye nightly tools extension, which allows you to make your non-compatible extensions to run with lastest betas.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:49 am
Yeah, I’ve been meaning to try Firebug. I stopped using AdBlock because after running a site that relies on ads to survive, blocking ads seemed hypocritical and I appreciate now that blocking them is selfish - if I want to benefit from the free resources made available on good sites, the price I have to pay is having ads in there.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I don’t have any need for it yet, although the CSS3 support would be nice as there’s some really nifty features. I don’t usually touch betas though, I leave that for the testers
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm
(OT) This may be rank justification of my selfish actions, but I feel like the ad industry has so completely abused my trust that I have no problem blocking ads. Pop-ups, pop-unders, flashy-blinky animations, playing sounds, the list goes on. If they hadn’t been assholes, and if they’d stop being assholes, I’d quit being a selfish asshole myself.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I would also recommend Tab Mix. It adds a lot of useful functionability, such as tab locking and tab protection. I agree about ad-blocking; since visit so many open-source sites, I feel that they deserve any revenue they get. If you don’t like flash ads, I would simply disable flash altogether.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
It seems that the main reason that is faster is that they’ve increased the default number of persistent connections allowed to each website from 2 to 8. Apparently IE8 is going to do the same thing too.
The RFC documents say the value should be 2 but I guess websites are being used somewhat differently now than they were when that was written so perhaps it does need to change. A lot more grahics and a lot more “Ajax” style interactions make a difference I expect. Apparently you can get most of the same speed ups by changing the configuration or registry settings with existing versions anyway.
It’s all good anyway
April 4th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
@John: Ah, interesting, thanks.
@irrdev: I’ll put Tab Mix on my evaluation list too then
April 5th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Opera’s default maximum number of connections is 8 already, as far back as version 9.0 I think.
April 5th, 2008 at 11:37 am
FlashGot is back :D. Missing Google Browser sync though, as I’m currently using someone else’s computer, so I don’t want to install too much. The ability to add tags to your bookmarks in Firefox 3 is awesome!