Mozilla releases Firefox 3 beta 1 (for real this time)

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Open Source, Beta

Mozilla releases Firefox 3 beta 1 (for real this time)

by Brad Linder Nov 20th 2007

The first real, official, and honest to-goodness beta release of Firefox 3 is out. You know, not like that little false alarm pre-beta version we told you about a few weeks ago.

Still, the main differences between this beta and that pre-release copy are that the Firefox team has spent a few more weeks hammering out bugs. The feature set is pretty much what we knew it would be.

Updates to the Gecko rendering engine which should improve stability.
New Places feature makes it easier to find the sites you've visited most recently, most often, or starred for coming back to later.
New security features alert you when you're visiting insecure web sites and let you auto-scan downloads with your antivirus software

We're still not quite ready to replace Firefox 2 with an admittedly still buggy beta. But it's pretty exciting to see where Mozilla is going with its flagship web browser.

Tags: firefox, firefox-3, firefox-3-beta, web-browser

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

james said 11:36AM on 11-20-2007

been using it for a couple of hours and they really have fixed the memory hogging. This is back to the good olds days and FF is now as fast as Opera and the new places and bookmarking are effing great.

Cant wait for the full release so that my 15 or so extensions can all work but this looks like a really great release. Stability, speed and security.

Kenban said 11:57AM on 11-20-2007

I am hoping that printing has finally been redone. I am getting sick of opening up IE just to print sites with tables

Doug H said 1:13PM on 11-20-2007

If I install 3.0 beta, will it over-write my 2.x version? If so, is there a way to create a separate version and preserve the 2.x version? Tx

victorav said 1:32PM on 11-20-2007

install sandboxie.com, then run ff 2.x through sanboxie, then run ff beta through sanboxie. you may want to change the location of your sandboxie temp folder. to see how well you extension works on ff beta, download the xpi again, but change the max version of the install.rdf file to 4.x. it will install, but may not work well. try it out. google toolbar extension does not work well though ;)

Nayf said 3:14PM on 11-20-2007

I installed it for a while, but to be honest I wasn't that impressed... Alright, I acknowledge that it's only a beta so it's far from perfect; but it was using up nearly twice as much memory as 2 with the same three tabs open! And that's with no addons installed - I've got about 25 doing my bidding in 2.

Zerbe said 4:17PM on 11-20-2007

My system kept locking up, although I did install it overtop of 2.09 without uninstalling that first. Might have had something to do with it.

David said 5:21PM on 11-20-2007

I tried it for a about 20 minutes before uninstalling it.NONE of my extensions or themes worked,and as Nayf mentioned,it uses even MORE memory than 2,so I'm wondering how it was faster for james.The customization/expandibility of Firefox has always been what made it great,and I don't see how hundreds of extensions and themes will possibly be updated very quickly.As far as security,I have more than enough security software already.The Mozilla folks should concentrate on something other than these so called security features.I also don't see the "Places" feature as useful at all.I'm afraid I'll be having to jump browsers soon,after being a die-hard Firefox supporter for years.It just seems to be getting worse instead of better.

Marty said 11:15PM on 11-20-2007

I still can't get on board with Firefox 2. I hate paying high prices for bandwidth only to have my browser hang-up the web page.

Gardiner Westbound said 7:56PM on 11-21-2007

I am a long time Firefox fan and really like it, but if Version 3 doesn't fix the memory leakage and hanging problems I'll be looking elsewhere for a browser. Maxthon is looking better and better.

Mark said 11:26PM on 12-01-2007

Hey,

Anyone know by any chance know what this error means when I open Firefox in OS X Leopard?

"Alert - please go to menu, tools,extensions and set valid values for email notifier, from its options"

Thanks,

Mark

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