Firefox 3 Beta 4 review
Firefox 3 Beta 4 is about to be released (later today or tomorrow), as the twelfth milestone, in what already is the longest development time for a Firefox version since the initial Firefox 1.0 back in 2004.
Fortunately, Mozilla has not been shy to set as many milestones as needed, and given the many new features and tweaks Firefox 3 introduces, it seems anything but sensible, specially considering it’s not only about Firefox but Gecko, the web page rendering engine and the Mozilla platform as a whole which affects the many products based on it.
Performance
Firefox 3 gets several performance improvement gains. Among them, profile guided optimizations (PGO) provides an optimized Firefox build based on the way it internally works. So far it is only available for Windows. Linux should follow shortly and Mac OS X could also make it before final release.
A very noticeable gain can be seen in JavaScript: it is about three times faster than Firefox 2 implementation. JavaScript is twice as important for Firefox since it is not only used for millions of web pages that use it but Firefox manages the UI through JavaScript code.
Memory wise, a much needed memory cycle collector is now in place to take care of freeing memory no longer used by modules that requested it but failed to release it properly. This and other memory oriented tweaks, seem to have paid off so far: a set of tests I recently ran suggests a noticeable increase in memory management efficiency with more memory freed as tabs and windows are closed and no mysterious memory eat up when Firefox is idle as it has been reported several times in the past for Firefox 2.
Places
A much announced and expected feature is Places, the integrated history and bookmarks manager interface powered by SQLite, a small open source database engine that provides much more robust querying capabilities.
With Places you are able to search your history, tags and bookmarks with a fully fledged search interface. You can select where to search (History, Bookmarks Menu, Bookmarks Toolbar, All Bookmarks or the selected folder), what to search (visited date, web address or title), combine criteria and then save the search as a Smart Bookmark that updates as your personal web grows and changes.
The Library, Places manager, also adds backup and restore UI so it is easier to recover a damaged file or incorrectly deleted bookmark.
Tagging is a new Firefox feature tightly related with Places and some of the changes to the location bar: click on an empty star icon in the location bar to save the current page as a bookmark. Click it again and you can specify a folder to save the bookmark to and add tags which you can later use to perform searches.
The Location Bar
The autocomplete list that appears when you start entering letters in the location bar is no longer restricted to web addresses but also looks into bookmark and history page titles and tags which make it more comprehensive.
Suggestions are shown in two different lines and colors for page titles and addresses, which according to studies on human cognition, makes it easier for us to focus on what we are looking for. So, if the user knows she is entering part of a web address or a page title it will be easier for her to find what she’s looking for. Highlighting the match result also helps to direct the user’s attention.
New in Beta 4 is adaptive learning: Firefox will keep an eye of what you type and what you select. After a few repetitions Firefox will understand what you’re trying to do and provide better suggestions. This should address the case where frecency (a combined frequency and recency index) didn’t provide the best results.
Beta 4 also brings support for multiword search so “firefox downloads” filters address, titles and tags containing both words but not necessarily in that order.
I believe this feature alone is the best Firefox 3 has to offer, justifies Places large resources investment and will become a landmark in Firefox and web browsers in general development. Once you get used to it, there is no turning back.
Visual Refresh
One of the most visible changes are the theme updates in all platforms. On Windows XP and Vista, a large part of the planned new XP icons has been added to the main toolbar, the Options window, the Download Manager, here and there. Beta 4 introduces some minor changes to the back and forward buttons with arrow styles that better blend with the other main stop and reload icons.
The Options window on Windows XP with the new icons.
Mac OS X users get Proto, a new Safari-like theme introduced with Beta 2. Linux users also get a very well integrated theme that uses native icons.
The back and forward buttons have been combined in a single keyhole-shaped widget featuring a single history menu and is now featured in all platforms except Linux.
According to the new guidelines, consistency across platforms is obtained through icons shape while OS integration is provided by texture. In Linux case, it’s very hard to set one due to the many available distributions and their particular themes.
For those who prefer the old back/forward buttons style, an option to split them is being considered. There could also be a revised throbber (the connection activity indicator) coming soon.
The Home button has been moved to the Bookmarks toolbar by default but can be easily moved back: Select Toolbars and then Customize… from the View menu. Drag the home button to the navigation bar.
An invisible splitter is added between the location and search bars when they are placed next to each other. It lets you customize their width.
Developers are aiming to deliver better operating system integration in Firefox 3. This will be most notable for Mac OS X and Linux users who will now get native widgets like text boxes, menus, check boxes, icons, button order and orientation following each OS guidelines.
Mac OS X users get integration with Growl, a popular centralized notification system, while Windows Vista gets native looking menus and blue icons that blend better with overall Vista look.
See more Windows XP, Vista and Linux screenshots in this recent post.
The Page Information dialog has been reviewed to become more organized and informative and allows to set all site specific preference from a single location.
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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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