Firefox 3 beta is (almost) out

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Browser Tips, Beta

Firefox 3 beta is (almost) out

by Brad Linder Nov 7th 2007

Mozilla doesn't plan to officially launch Firefox 3 beta for another few days. But the crafty folks over at Digg have umm, dugg up a few download links for anyone who can't wait to get their hands on the newest version of the popular web browser.

As usual, Mozilla is releasing Mac, Linux, and Windows versions of Firefox. And the developers have put a handy little Read Me note up on the FTP site stating that they'd really prefer if you waited until the official announcement to download the browser so that their servers don't get hammered. Thanks to Digg, it's probably too late for that, so we went ahead and downloaded a copy of Firefox 3 beta anyway.

At first glance, you won't notice many changes from Firefox 2. In fact, Firefox 3 beta will import all of your settings, bookmarks, add-ons and plugins from Firefox 2, so at first you might think you've opened the wrong program. We even installed Firefox 3 beta using Sandboxie so that it wouldn't overwrite our old settings, and all the data was easily imported.

Update: Mozilla has posted a note making it clear that the Firefox 3.0b1 is a release candidate of Firefox 3 beta, which was not meant for general consumption yet. If you can hold your horses a few more days, there should be an official release soon.

But in addition to the upgrades under the hood, there are a few nice new features in Firefox 3 beta. For example, you'll notice a star icon sitting in your URL bar. It works sort of like the star in Google Reader or Gmail. Click it to remember websites you like or want to come back to later. Click it again to create a permanent bookmark.

While that might not sound like a big deal, it works because of a completely redesigned bookmark system in Firefox 3 called Places. If you look at your Bookmark toolbar, you'll notice a new folder called places, when you open it up you'll see a bunch of options that you didn't have in older versions of the web browser.

You can instantly view all of your most recently visited sites, recently starred sites, or pages that you visit most often. Click the "Open All in Tabs" button and each listed site will open in a new Firefox Tab.

A few other changes include an enhanced plugin manager, security requirements for upgrading add-ons, and an enhanced security system that alerts you of suspected attacks. Visit this page in Firefox 3 to see an example.

While Mozilla is expected to release native themes for Windows, Linux, and OS X, Firefox 3 beta ships with just the default Firefox theme that we've come to know, love, and occasionally get tired of.

Tags: bookmarks, firefox, firefox-3beta, places

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Nick Smith said 12:01PM on 11-07-2007

oh and it passes the ACID2 test

kingkool68 said 12:14PM on 11-07-2007

I hope they have improved stability and memory management because my browser needs to be restarted every 6 hours or so.

Big John said 12:51PM on 11-07-2007

"oh and it passes the ACID2 test"

Good, I was worried that this new web browser wouldn't pass a test designed over a year ago with purposely broken code.

henrrrik said 1:41PM on 11-07-2007

@Big John,

1. ACID2 tests how the browser deals with faulty code, so the fact that the code is broken is the whole point.
2. Why would the age of the test make it less significant? It's not like HTML and CSS has become obsolete since 2005. Mozilla obviously agrees since they took the time to fix it.

James said 3:35PM on 11-07-2007

ACID2 is a condensed set of unit tests, basically, to make sure your HTML rendering engine works as it's supposed to (according to spec). If everybody made sure their browser passed it, we'd have a lot less problems where page authors need to write one version of a page for IE and one for Firefox (at minimum).

I can't believe somebody is seriously suggesting that such a test doesn't have merit...

Kyle Mathews said 3:42PM on 11-07-2007

I've been running the various alphas of firefox 3 for several months now (Ubuntu let's you run firefox 3 side-by-side with firefox 2). Two huge improvements I've seen are memory management and rendering speed. If I have both versions of firefox running, after a few hours firefox 2 will be using as much as twice the ram as firefox 3. Also, firefox 3 feels much snappier then firefox 2. Pages load much quicker and sites with lots of javascript get pushed through noticably quicker on my oldish system.

ipodrulz said 4:24PM on 11-07-2007

... so is this Cocoa for Mac?.. and is there a new interface?

Aizat said 9:08AM on 11-28-2007

I might try the new beta version of firefox 3.
Though I don't prefer firefox..
I am more into IE..
But why everyone is campaigning on firefox..?

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