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First look at Firefox 3.0 Beta 1


section: download, for your questions: KezNews forum, 20.11.2007

I noticed that the Beta 1 for Firefox 3.0 was made available sometime yesterday. I’ve been curious as to whether the Firefox dev team would do a serious revamp for this release or just concentrate on bug fixes and performance improvements.




Early indications seem to suggest that it is indeed a major revamp of both the core and the UI, and that Firefox will be a much better browser for it.

I’m not a big Firefox user because I find the memory management to be very poor most of the time and the spiraling memory consumption affects both Firefox’s performance and the overall performance of my systems. I like Firefox but Firefox just doesn’t like me, so, while I have it installed on most systems, I mostly use Internet Explorer 7 and Opera for day to day browsing. Every time I say this I’m faced by a chorus of users telling me that there’s no problem with the way that Firefox handles memory, but this isn’t what I’m seeing. When a browser starts to edge near to consuming 500MB of RAM on a regular basis, something is wrong. Sure, I hammer the browser and have dozens of pages open at a time, but since both IE and Opera can handle this load, I expect Firefox to do so too. So far, it can’t, and because of that the icon doesn’t get clicked on that often.



Over the past few years I’ve felt that Firefox has lost its way and moved too far away from its roots. Firefox used to be about security and performance, but lately I’ve felt that add-ons and junking up the interface with eye-candy has taken priority over security and core stability.

Is Firefox 3.0 going to be better? Given what I’m seeing so far, I think so. Why? Because it looks like Mozilla have gone back to basics and worked on what really matters to users - security, speed and ease of use.

Everything about Firefox 3.0 beta 1 is fast. The download package is small which means that it comes in fast, the installation is fast, the browser fires up fast, pages and tabs open fast, the browser shuts down fast, and the uninstall process is fast and painless (I always like to test the uninstall process on applications because there’s nothing worse than having a bad house guest on your system that you can’t get rid of). This is all good stuff.

Without a doubt the Firefox 3.0 UI has been dramatically improved. Compare version 3 to version 2 and you instantly see the difference. Everything is brighter, clearer, and easier to access. Things that should be simple, such as bookmarking, saving passwords, and finding words and phrases in the text of a web page are now simple. Page zooming is brilliant, as is the feature that resumes interrupted downloads.

Download: Firefox 3.0 Beta 1


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Comments(11)

Like Beta 1? Try the Trunk!!!

By foxlover on 21.11.2007 - 01:11
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/nightly/latest-trunk/

what is Trunk

By BasicKiller on 21.11.2007 - 06:11
sorry, what does trunk mean?

I'll wait for the final release

By Yousef on 21.11.2007 - 07:11
it's better to wait for the final version, i hate beta(s), they are full of bugs

a disaster

By kj on 21.11.2007 - 13:11
i installed it and watched the memory it was using quickly increase befre after about 1 minute it crashed my system and firefoxx beta 1 was using over 1,500,000k of ram! and one last thing....i hadnt even opened a webpage yet.

Firefox is on the right path

By Persian_boy on 21.11.2007 - 14:11
i used firefox about 4 years and beta1 for 3 weeks. i have to say that beta1 indicates that firefox is on the right path... it's not perfect yet, but it grows fast and correct itself..
and it is not the final version yet..


trees

By elb on 21.11.2007 - 22:11
a trunk is above the root of a tree.

TrunkDef

By Vollen on 22.11.2007 - 16:11

trunk = womans ass i.e. "junk in the trunk."



trunk

By www.flicenflac.biz on 22.11.2007 - 21:11
the trunk refers to the unnamed branch (version) of a file tree under revision control. the trunk is usually meant to be the base of a project on which development progresses. if developers are working exclusively on the trunk, it always contains the latest cutting-edge version of the project, but might hence also be the most unstable one. another approach is to split a branch off the trunk, implement changes in that branch and merge the changes back into the trunk when the branch has proven to be stable and working. depending on development mode and commit policy the trunk may contain the most stable or the least stable or something-in-between version.

often main developer work is done in the trunk and stable versions are branched, and occasional bug-fixes are merged from branches to the trunk. when development of future versions is done in non-trunk branches, it is usually done for projects that do not change often, or where a change is expected to take a long time to develop until it will be ready for incorporating in the trunk.
software spanner this software engineering-related article is a stub. you can help wikipedia by expanding it.

Umm I dont think so

By Zero on 23.11.2007 - 16:11
this has been out for 2 weeks now but thanks for the info.

Y Hallo Thaar...

By Anarchy_Creator on 19.12.2007 - 11:12
y hello thar kj.
exactly how much does uncle moneybags... i mean billy boy-o pay you to go around spouting lies about other web browsers?
come on man 1.43051147 gigabytes, and you supposedly didn't even open one web page?
either you are a total moron, and a complete system noob who has one hell of a case of spyware/virii/trojan infestation, or you're obviously on the payroll of m$.
now go peddle your wares somewhere else burn boy.

my mem use

By Bone1970 on 27.12.2007 - 07:12
i have 6 tabs open and my max men use is 143.000 kb


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