Firefox 3 Beta 4 review
Tabbed Browsing
On tabbed browsing, Firefox will not only warn you when closing several tabs and windows at once but will prompt if you want to save the currently open tab set: a good catch and a good way to introduce this helpful feature to new users.
Tabs now scroll with a smoothly. You can also duplicate tabs when you press Ctrl while dragging a tab and move them across windows by dragging them. Unlike previous betas, you get actual duplicates including the complete tab’s history. A very helpful addition!
Web experience
Firefox can save site specific preferences. For example you could allow just some pages to use AJAX, set a specific spell checker language, images, etc. Firefox 3 will remember the zoom level you have applied for a certain site and will zoom automatically the next time you visit it.
Net protocols (like irc, news, webcal and mailto) and certain documents handling can be passed to web services. For example, Yahoo Mail or Gmail may become your default application for mailto: links. For this, the previous web feeds page has been extended to the Options window for all content and protocols. Firefox 3 recognizes podcasts and video podcast feeds from regular ones so you can specify a different application for each.
Media feeds are displayed with a link to the media file in feed preview mode.
By default, web sites can’t move or resize Firefox via JavaScript. A list of authorized web sites can be maintained through Advanced JavaScript Settings in the Content page in Options.
Search engines
The search engine manager lets you set and change keywords for search engines. With keywords, if you associate the w keyword with Wikipedia (now a default search engine), you could enter w hawaii in the locationbar and search Wikipedia for Hawaii.
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March 10th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
I love it.
I don’t get why you still are in “beta” after 4 releases. Could you use another name? Gamma? Delta?
Because if you do 5 betas you might as well go all the way and make 10 alfas, what’s the difference at this point?
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March 10th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
“Betas” are generally pre-release but still not final builds. There were eight alphas of Firefox 3 before the betas started and they were much rougher, really only for the truly dedicated or developers. This is near final quality but with still significant bug fixes occurring.
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March 10th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Yes, I know that, I’m not new here.
What I meant was why are we calling something beta, beta, beta, beta? There should be ONE alfa, ONE beta and ONE of every greek letter.
We should be passing lambda at this point.
PD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet
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March 11th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Leo wrote:
“Yes, I know that, I’m not new here.”
Apparently you don’t know. The terms “alpha” and “beta” have specific meanings in software development:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_version
There is no such thing as a “gamma version”.
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March 11th, 2008 at 8:30 am
This is great news but do you know of a targeted Production date for Firefox 3?
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March 11th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Yes, I know that.
What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t look logical to have several alphas and betas.
If beta is better than alfa then it should be something better than beta. And that could be called with the next greek letter.
I don’t find logical that we are enumerating things in a crappy order.
It’s like I tell you “count to 5″, and you say “1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4.. 2, 3, 4, 4.1, 4.2, oh, and 5″
No, it should be “1, 2, 3, 4, and 5″. No middle crap.
So by that logic we should be counting alpha (ONLY ONE TIME), beta (ONLY ONE TIME) and so on and so forth with every greek letter.
That’s what I’m saying.
I already know what’s happening with alphas and betas and people say, that’s exactly why I’m complaining. It’s wrong.
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March 11th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Question:
The last time I used this browser, Microsoft downloads would not download. For example, updates.
Do you know if this is a local issue or can I expect that I have to use Explorer to update?
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March 11th, 2008 at 10:26 am
@docbiz, it’s just the way Microsoft implemented Windows Update which requires ActiveX controls that are not supported by Firefox. By the way, it’s a feature. ActiveX controls are regarded as one of the most common ways to get malware into your computer.
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March 11th, 2008 at 10:30 am
@Leo, the thing is alpha and beta are not “counting” development releases but describing them. You could say Firefox 3 Bomb 1, Bomb 2 etc. and you know it may kill you. Then Firefox 3 Sharp 1, Sharp 2, etc. and you know it could just give you a cut.
Because software development is not that fun they just agreed with alpha and beta.
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March 11th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Question 2.
If FFx becomes my default browser, how would it effect MS Updats?
Sidney
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March 11th, 2008 at 10:46 am
@docbiz, it won’t affect it. The Windows Update link in the All Programs Menu actually launches Internet Explorer and connects to http://www.update.microsoft.com/. You can also launch Internet Explorer and select Windows Update from the Tools menu in either IE 6 or 7.
You can even install the Windows Update extension for Firefox and it will add a Windows Update item to Firefox’s Tools menu that launches IE. It is not compatible with Firefox 3 Beta 4 yet though.
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March 11th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Firefox Alpha, Beta, 1.0, 2.1, etc., whatever it is… so far this new release just seems to blow everything else away. Found no bugs yet, but have only been exercising it for the last hour or so. It seems to render our own WEB site faster and more accurately than Betas 3 did. I’m impressed!
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March 11th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
The Vista theme is absolutely awful! Really! I am using Firefox especially because it is one of the only application on Vista that still has professional credibility.
The new XP theme also doesn’t look good. Especially the icons.
Anyone considers these icons are somewhat better than Firefox 2?
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March 11th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Right now i’m running :
AMD Athlon(TM) 4 1300+ (960mhz)
192MB SDRAM
will it be sufficient to run Firefox 3 beta 4? The ver. 2 makes my computer hangs everytime i opens more than 3 tabs :(
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March 11th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Is it just me or do some bits of this not read coherently? E.g.
“Beta 4 also brings support for multiword search so firefox downloads filters address, titles and tags containing both words though not necessarily in that order.”
That makes no sense to me.
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March 11th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
@bob, firefox downloads is in italics and an example of what you would enter in the location bar. I’ve added double quotes and changed “though” for “but” so hopefully it is clearer now.
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March 11th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
No, it makes perfect sense to me.
So, BetaIV. I haven’t noticed too many differences yet, but I prefer the more uniform Vista theme. It’s a pity that the buttons haven’t been smothed out before this beta’s release. I’m pretty sure that was done for the XP lolgreen icons, so it just makes the Vista icons look like an afterthought, really.
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March 11th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Oh yeah, one more GUI thing, pertaining to the consideration of an option to split the buttons: I like the small icons, so I’d like to see either those, only done larger; or I suppose rounded squares, or even just line arrows.
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March 11th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Question!
Did they fix the crashing of this review in Beta 4? Beta 3 doesn’t like it.
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March 11th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
@Alec Munro:
My Firefox 3 Beta 4 is crashing. But only when Firebug is enabled. :-S
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March 12th, 2008 at 5:19 am
THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING! Still has that ass-backward substitute for bookmarking, and now a cheap and nasty looking interface on Windows? What are they smoking? plugged memory leaks and a slightly more up to date rendering engine are not enough to make up for that. I’m waiting for the plugin to fix bookmarking and the custom skins, thank you. Until then, Opera here I come!
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March 16th, 2008 at 5:17 am
I’m really impressed with performance of FF3 b4.
Thanks for great work. And zoom is also great feature (I know, Opera had it before).
I don’t care that much about look, but now Firefox looks really nice in GNOME.
I see there’s even more features to discover yet.
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March 16th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
You can always just get the ‘IE tab’ extension for Firefox that allows you to load pages using IE’s engine but through Firefox. It also comes preset to automatically load the Windows Update page with IE’s engine. This way you can update using Firefox and Windows thinks your using IE. Best extension ever
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March 17th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
well I have been using beta4 since it came out…man I love it. I used it extensively on both on my Win XP and Ubuntu systems and works great. I am really liking they direction Mozilla took with FF3 especially in the themes department.
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March 17th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
duplicate tab does duplicate history!
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March 19th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Since Firefox is able to do so many nifty tricks- has anyone ever contemplated changing the scrollbar from the right side to the left?
On a laptop, it’d be sweet to have the scrollbar on the left side, where most of the action of the cursor takes place.
I’m actually surprised no one’s done a plug in or a hack to do that yet. Just a thought.
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March 20th, 2008 at 6:15 am
As a software developer, I can tell you that it would be GUI suicide to change the placement of the scrollbar - as a default anyway.
Usability is all about uniformity, and if you start moving around standard elements of the GUI, you absolutely ruin the overall usability.
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March 20th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
I wasn’t talking about changing the scrollbar from right to left for everyone, I was curious if it could be done via a hack or plugin, for those few weirdos like me that might prefer it on that side. Since the file/back/forward/ and other browser commands are typically assigned to the left side, it just would make things easier and faster for me to have the scrollbar on the left side, since that’s where most of my mouse work takes place.
Just a plug in or a hack is all I want, not to change the way the world works.
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March 21st, 2008 at 12:09 pm
@Steve March
Sorry … misunderstood you. My bad :-)
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March 24th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I’ve been using Firefox since version 1.5.0.4, it is my everyday browser. I’ve used IE7,opera 9 but like FF because of it’s simple design, easier to use and as of ff3 beta 4 there are lot of improvements… but certain things that i wish could be better is that 1.the location bar in xp (as of beta 4) does not look good, the Go button is always not available, so i have to click the reload button, this makes confusion, it would be better if the Go button like of ff 2 would always be available on the location bar. 2. It would be better if the drop down menu bar on the location bar would look more visible. 3. the stop button does not look good, the previous one as of ff 2 was nice. 4. the home button with red roof looks distracting. 5. it would be better if i do not loose my cache due to browser crash or sudden power failure which happens in ff 2 6. why can’t we view the cache in firefox like of IE or opera (where we could view the jpeg or videos etc clearly from Temporary Internet Files in IE and cache in opera) 7. the most useful addon that i use is the real player browser record plugin but it is not compatible with ff 3 beta 4… I hope it will work with ff 3. 8. In ff 2 when i used to open new tab, it opens smoothly but in beta 4, i experienced blinking while opening new tab. 9. the save page as feature from right click within the browser window does not work on beta4, i had to save pages using ctrl+s and the download completed notification slide always pop up after i save pages.
when i had 10 tabs open and using DTA downloading a file, the task manager showed beta 4 using 61,504k memory - Is this normal?
Hope someone will reply here…
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March 30th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Hello I had expected someone would reply…
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April 13th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
I can’t access Project Web Access webpage can you please include the use of active x controls until then I will never be able to utilize firefox as my main browser of choice.
I hope that Firefox 3.0 will have active x installation capabilities.
thanks.
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PaulJune 20th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Just add the add-on IE Tab. It will permit you to use active X features.
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April 13th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
There will never be any Active X support within Firefox. Active X is proprietary to Microsoft and it is a Windows only technology. Mozilla supports open standards and is cross-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows).
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April 22nd, 2008 at 3:22 pm
When moving the “HOME” button to the Navigation bar (or any other button for that matter), then the whole of Navigation bar
goes INactive, meaning that No “File”, “Edit”, or any other navigation button is clickable after the move.
please advise…
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May 29th, 2008 at 11:40 am
real player download video plugin not working
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June 21st, 2008 at 11:19 am
I tried using firefox 3 but it still has bugs and i dont like being a tester for these companys so i still use firefox 2 which is great!
http://firefoxfreebie.blogspot.com
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