I mean I like it, I like what seem to be improvements. But too many extensions that I like aren’t ready for the new version yet, and I’m not jumping ship until I can have some of my themes and extensions back.
So, you add-on developers, get a move on would ya?
**MBG
**
(from the comfort of 2.0.0.14)
They know.
I know, I saw that too before sampling. I thought it was worth the time to check out though.
:: tapping foot ::
I tried it because it came as standard with Ubuntu 8.04, which I installed the other day - interesting, but didn’t seem to be better than 2.0 in any way that affects me, and was less comfortable to use in others (font rendering, for example, is piss poor). I reverted to 2.whatever
I like how when you enlarge a page, and now enlarge the graphics proportionally, too. Useful for reading some of the online comics with smaller type, on my crappy old monitor.
I just installed it. I was planning to just check it out and then go back to 2.whatever, but I think I’m keeping it, as I’m already hooked on how bookmarks are handled. I can now just click the star icon in the adress bar and it sticks a bookmark into “unsorted bookmarks”, and in a list of pages that have been recently bookmarked. I can bookmark anything that looks vaguely interesting as I go about browsing, and then later look at the “recently bookmarked” list, move anything I need into my regular bookmarks, and just ignore the rest. A great improvement from constantly adding and removing bookmarks, as I’ve been doing up until now.
Heck, I don’t know if I explained that very well, and it may seem like a small thing, but it’s really the clincher for me.
Yeah that looked kinda neat. I missed my Google toolbar though. I know it’s coming along so I can wait. And there are some themes I want to update.
I’m hearing without totally understanding that there’s a fix to the big memory use that happens now when a lot of tabs are open. It’s not unusual for me to have 12-15 open at once which can totally cram my memory on this piss-ass Toshiba Tablet.
The Yahoo toolbar has many of the same functions as the Google toolbar (except it uses Yahoo search, of course), and it works on FF 3.
I really miss the Google Sync add-on, though.
It’s not just a lot of tabs being open that sucks memory in 2.0 – there are numerous memory leaks, such that the longer you use Firefox without closing it down, the more memory it will consume. It’s not usual for that process to be consuming 1GB or more on my machine, at which point it will take a minute or more to properly exit. I’ve heard that v3 radically reduces those bugs, which is something I’ve been hoping for from the very first release of 2.0.
That’s the page for the Beta 1 release. There have been 4 more Beta releases since then, and we are now on Release Candidate 1, which is quite a different animal from Beta 1.
I really like FF3. Not all of my extensions are supported yet, but most of the really important ones are.
I like the new address bar search feature, where you can start typing in the address bar and it will search your previous pages not only in the URL, but in the page title and description. I’ve read some people on the Mozilla forums who don’t like it, but i think it’s ace.
I also like the AV integration. When you download a file, Firefox automatically scans it for viruses. And the download window is now searchable, which is also handy at times.
I like having tags for bookmarks. It’s a handy addition to folders, making bookmarks easier to search.
Overall it does seem faster in its rendering and in things like switching between tabs, although i’m not convinced they completely solved the memory leak. I’ve had a few instances where it will chug to a halt, and an investigation of system processes shows high memory use. But it’s less of a problem than it used to be.
Overall, i think they’ve made the best browser better.