Comments on: Have you tried Firefox 3 Beta 1?

By: Mike Scott

Mike Scott — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 11:53:17 +0000

Smooth scrolling on OS X is unusable, as there is a significant time-lag between stopping scrolling with the mouse and the scrolling actually stopping on-screen. With Safari, the scroll stops immediately you stop moving the wheel/mouse, which is as it should be.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 17:50:47 +0000

After I installed the pre-release version of firefox 3 beta 2 (also known as minefield?), the live bookmarks function in beta 1 is completely broken!

It installs into a different directory from firefox!

C:\Program Files\Minefield

Beta 1 still has quite a few bugs, the back and forward buttons don’t work at all, cannot bookmark pages at all, and hovering onto any part of firefox with the mouse cursor shows text from a previously-browsed page non-stop. This is really annoying.

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:07:13 +0000

Yahoo mail freaks out when I log in. It works in the classic mode, but not the new one. Overall I love it! It definitely seems “lighter” and loads quicker.

By: Sol Berger

Sol Berger — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:33:52 +0000

Absolutely fabulous!!! I am working on a PPC Mac using 10.4.11 and your 3.b1 software is by far superior to Safari (and Camino 1.5.x & 1.6pre1a which I have been using exclusively for the last two years). You screen appears very nicely; letters and articles use a gorgeous font; pages render very, very fast; overall design is excellent. Here’s hoping for a speedy final of 3.

By: Cameron

Cameron — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:01:46 +0000

Awesomebar and performance rocks for me. Haven’t really noticed any other differences.

By: Aditya Banerjee

Aditya Banerjee — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:24:45 +0000

I took the beta for a spin using Sandboxie (http://abaditya.wordpress.com/2007/11/21/sandboxing-firefox-3-beta-and-first-impressions/), and found it to be a lot more responsive, with seemingly better memory management than version 2 plus the general tweaks were quite nice. Looks promising, but most of my frequently used extensions are incompatible at the moment. So, not going to make the switch yet.

By: jp

jp — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:28:26 +0000

Nice improvements, but I am missing one important feature since the beginning of Mozilla/Firefox: native support for viewing TIF files.

Many sites that offer scanned books or documents show them in TIF, e.g. the US Patent Office or the Universial Digital Library.

It is a pity that FF still cannot show these things natively.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:16:09 +0000

I really have not noticed any difference yet except for the star bookmarking system (useful) and a few more configuration options (or did I miss them before?). The themes and extensions I use(d) (mostly) do not work (right now), but I guess once FF3 gets closer to release (or is released) this will no longer be an issue.

The performance is great, but I only have 1 extension loaded, so it’s difficult to judge it right now.

By: Jilles van Gurp

Jilles van Gurp — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:40:58 +0000

So far so good. Performance seems great, as reported all over the place. I’ve been using this at home since it was released and aside from breaking most of my extensions the experience is quite good. I’m sure those extensions will catch up.

I was slightly disappointed to see several features in the requirements posted earlier this year missing in action. There’s no openid support; no cardspace support and no microformat UI. I was kind of looking forward to Firefox dramatically improving the web by supporting all three and it seems nobody is really working on this.

Additionally, what makes using Firefox 3.0 at work really annoying is this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235853 which looks like it has dropped off the radar for regular developers. This bug affects anyone using a custom proxy script, i.e. most enterprise users. As I reported in the bug earlier this week, some official Mozilla response to this bug would be great. If only a wontfix with some decent argumentation. I realize you guys have priorities but this is really a root cause for the “Firefox is slow” bug that you seem to be genuinely interested in fixing.

Detailed analysis + workarounds + probable cause of the problem is provided in the comments with the bug. The only thing missing is a patch that fixes it and an assigned developer to provide that patch.

By: claudia

claudia — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:51:35 +0000

How can i download the firefox 3 beta?

By: Warren Butler

Warren Butler — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:24:18 +0000

Really like it. Actually, I have used Minefield (close enough, I guess) as my daily browser for some time now. FF3 will rule the browser world.

On Ubuntu, when you select smooth scrolling, you really get smooth scrolling. I suspect this depends on a reasonable graphics card?

The awsomewbar, one-click star, etc are also great.

And now some of my (disabled) extensions are starting to come back to life as the developers update them to support the beta.

Cheers

Warren