Firefox 3 Beta 1
I will be nuking my boot camp partition because 15GB is not big enough on my MacBook Pro. I decided to try the new beta version of my favorite web browser, Firefox and it seems pretty stable so far. I am in fact writing this post in it!
There is a noticeable increase in speed but still has problems when I tried to load a site with over 20 images. It seems to lag when it’s caching the images. A lot but not all of my addons were Firefox 3 compatible like Tab Mix Plus, Foxmarks, Forecast Fox, etc.
The address bar has a new bookmark button next to the go button and it can’t be removed or separated. There is a new “Report a broken site” button which allows you to report a broken website to the developers. This is pretty cool because it gives the developers direct feedback to websites which do not work with Firefox. I would be interested to see how they will deal with spam or badly written websites.
A really good feature which they have added is the resumable download manager. You pause and resume downloads and it works! The download manager window has changed as well. I miss the clear button which clears the list but it has been moved to the right click context menu. They have added a search function to the download manager but I haven’t tried it yet.
Firefox 3 now has the ability to load web pages in the sidebar. This is a good idea but it’s not as intuitive as some addons which does this for you. You can only have one sidebar meaning you can only have two web sites open side by side. In order to open a web page in the sidebar you have to tick a tick box on the bookmark properties. I cannot see any other way of opening a web page in the sidebar other than the one described.
Bookmarks has also had an overhaul. The bookmark organizer is not arranged like Microsoft Outlook. There is a tree structure on the left, the list of bookmarks within the current leaf node on the right and detailed information about the bookmark on the bottom. There is a preview pane in the bottom panel but it doesn’t seem to work. There is also bookmark tagging. It allows you to tag bookmarks with your own classification. It still exports the bookmarks in a html file. There is a new bookmark in the bookmark toolbar which lists useful bookmarks like most visited, most used tagged bookmarks etc. Nice feature.
Visually they have tweaked it a bit. It looks more integrated and seamless than the previous versions but there are still no icons in the menu items even though they have left space for it.
