I downloaded a copy of Firefox 3 (beta) for linux earlier this evening to see how it was. I’ve been having very annoying issues with Firefox 2 on Ubuntu locking up randomly, so I was hoping to see if the new version would help.
Unfortunately there isn’t an official Ubuntu release as yet, but you can easily use the standard download for linux.
I’m trying desperately to be impressed and find something to “wow” about, but so far it’s left me completely underwhelmed.
If anything its “enhancements” are simply annoying.
They’re mostly aesthetic and may simply be a case of them being different to what I’m used to.
As you start typing in an address into the toolbar it tries to “suggest” addresses from your “history” but in so doing it takes up loads of screen estate and invariably gets it wrong.
Of course it’s a beta release, so you’d have to be really dumb to expect it to work properly! Beta software is meant to have bugs. Ideally they should be squashed before the software is made available to the general public.
Whether I’ll keep playing around with this version or revert to the older one is something I’m not 100% sure about just yet.. We’ll see
It feels far far faster rendering large and complex pages – I say feels because I haven’t done any scientific based tests. Its memory footprint really has dropped (Firefox 2 open for 10 minutes here, visited maybe 10 pages and its at 142Mb; Firefox 3 was at 63Mb – again rather unscientific, but I’m thrilled with these improvements). One caveat with these is that Firefox 3 is not running any of the 5 or so extensions I normally run, as few if any extensions are yet available for FF3. Agreed on the address bar changes, seems very windows XP default theme-ish 😛
I only had a very quick look at it on someone elses machine a while ago. I agree there was nothing that could be described as a wow factor, a few minor improvements that looked a little better but nothing to get too excited about.
In my opinion the biggest improvement they could make is to sort out the all consuming memory issue. I have a good load of ram these days so it’s not such an issue for me but for people with not so much ram, you really don’t want your browser taking up half of your available resources.
The auto-complete feature is a disaster. It seems to have a preference on page titles over url names for its keyword search.
@hostyle @Donn – I haven’t tested the memory impact yet, so I can’t really comment
@Cormac – at least you’ve proved that I’m not losing my mind 🙂
Oh Dear God! The auto-complete is driving me nuts!
I hadn’t really done much with it. I installed one of the betas a couple of months ago but obviously without all my crucial extensions it was nothing more than a bit of curiosity.
Again, hard to tell about the speed, but apparently it’s getting faster and faster the closer they get to a final release, which is definitely encouraging. The vast quantity of script heavy sites out there could do with some speeding up and I’ll definitely welcome that.
I hadn’t noticed the address bar auto-complete preferring Titles over URL’s, but again, I only fiddled with it briefly and hadn’t imported my bookmarks to see exactly how it fared.
I do like the idea of the address bar looking up bookmarks though, but I guess it needs to be done carefully.
Some of the integrations being made possible under the hood are pretty interesting. I’m glad to hear that Prism is now going to be an extension to FF3, which will be great for people running multiple logins on a single site and for a couple of web development things that irk me sometimes.
I believe though that memory leakage is not being improved that much and that FF4 is going to offer some pretty large advances there.
I’m also hugely intrigued by Weave, and hope that develops rapidly as it sounds pretty helpful and might save my dependency on the ever wonderful MozBackup!
A bit of a poorly constructed ramble there, hope I didn’t go on too much!
The automated filling in of the address bar is starting to drive me crazy as it’s picking up stuff from my inbox rather than where I wanted to go! PITA!
Oh dear, this auto complete thing sounds like it could be a problem that they’re going to need to look at carefully.
By the way Michele, I’ve subscribed to the comments on this thread, and I accidentally clicked on the unsubscribe link in the mail I got – the page I was directed to doesn’t exist!
It returned this error:
The requested URL /blog/plugins/CommentSubscribe/commentsubscribe.cgi was not found on this server.
If they don’t fix the auto-complete I’ll be changing browser. It’s that simple. I’ve been trying to use FF3 for the last two evenings at home and it has been an absolute nightmare primarily because of the auto-complete. I wish it was a small thing, but when you’ve ended up on the wrong page / site about ten times it gets a bit tedious
As for the comments thing – it’s on my todo list to speak to the developer about fixing it – it’s a variable setting that doesn’t seem to account for my setup
You can disable it in favour of the standard location bar:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.richResults
Not had any problems with it myself, tbh. I always end up at the right place, but a lot of people do seem to be complaining about it.
Ah cool – I assumed you were aware of the problem.
Re: auto-complete, you should get on the next Firefox test day and register your thoughts!
http://quality.mozilla.org/en/node/1439
Michele, if you’re looking for a good browser experience on OS X then look no further than Safari or Shira. Shira is a Japaneses developed browser (in English) but it’s glorious and the way it handles tabbed browsing is beyond anything which the other browsers had conjured up.
Be sure to get the stable version of Shira as the beta tends to explode upon impact.
Btw, I know you’re reviewing FF on Ubuntu and not on OS X, but still 🙂
Cormac
Does Safari or Shira have any plugin support? One of the reasons I like Firefox is that I can configure a couple of extras to work tightly with it.
The only reason I’m not testing on OSX is because OSX is my work machine and I really could do without productivity issues 🙂
Michele
Not sure about Shira because I don’t use it that much but Safari is extendable. Not to the extent of Firefox though. http://pimpmysafari.com/ is the primary extensions site for Safari.
Another popular choice for Mac users is Camino. Pimp my Camino is an extensions website for Camino but I’m not impressed with the overall performance of Camino at all. It leaks memory, handles flash movies poorly, tabs don’t work as well as other browsers and it is generally unreliable.
I only ever use FF for development purposes within work. It connects to Windows shares a lot better than Safari does and it handles SSL a lot better on local sites. If you’re looking for a pure development / test / browser on OS X then Sunrise Browser is what you’re looking for.
http://sunrisebrowser.com/en/
It basically takes all the web developer focused extensions which you find in FF and plops them a single browser. Sunrise has some really cool features.