Tom Raftery – Influencer, Thought Leader, and Storyteller focusing on Sustainability, Supply Chain, and Technology's take on how digitization and innovation are creatively disrupting our world
On trying the Acid3 test (Firefox 3.x passes Acid2) it scores a creditable 65/100, up from 61/100 for b3 but still seriously lagging behind Webkit’s 87/100.
Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecencyâ€) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.
I have been using Firefox 3.0 as one of my main browsers (along with Webkit) since 3.0b1 and despite the warnings
Firefox 3 Beta 4 is a developer preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only
I have found it to be rock solid and a much better browsing experience than Firefox 2.x
The only downside to Firefox 3.0bx is the lack of working plugins but once you try it for a couple of days, you will find it difficult to go back to Firefox 2.x – even with all your plugins!
I downloaded and installed the beta version of Firefox 3.0 a few days ago and have been using it since on my OS X Leopard laptop.
I also installed the Proto theme for Mac Firefox which significantly enhances the look of Firefox 3 on the Mac.
My initial impressions of Firefox 3.0b1 are very positive. It is fast, stable, looks really sweet and many of the memory issues which have dogged Firefox appear to have been fixed.
To expand on the memory comment, in Firefox the memory used to leak so the longer it remained open, the more memory it consumed. I have had Firefox running on this Mac now for several days with up to six windows open some of which have up to twenty five tabs running. Currently this is using 1.38gb of virtual memory. At the same time, Safari which has one window open with two tabs running is consuming 1.41gb of virtual memory!
Another change is the ability to Star and Tag bookmarks. Personally I prefer the way Flock allows you to bookmark directly into Del.icio.us.
One disadvantage of running the Firefox beta is that none of my favourite plugins now work but at least Del.icio.us have a bookmarklet which runs well out of the bookmarks toolbar so I can still bookmark there from Firefox.
The release notes list a raft of improvements under the headings:
More Security
Easier to Use
More Personal
Improved Platform for Developers and
Improved Performance
Overall, I like it. It seems much improved, more responsive and less of a memory hog. Shades of good things to come!
Tom Raftery – Influencer, Thought Leader, and Storyteller focusing on Sustainability, Supply Chain, and Technology's take on how digitization and innovation are creatively disrupting our world
