Firefox 3: The Flash
 

http://maxbro.files.wordpress.com/20...new_flashl.jpg

Whoa... what was that?! It was friggin firefox, and it was friggin fast.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...and-opera.html

I can attest to Firefox 3 beta being faster than Safari, in addition to Opera and IE (people still use IE?).

Firefox is where it's at.

I only use IE to update Windows XP as per the requirement.

I didn't know Firefox released 3. I will have to check it out!

Psst.... click on The Flash! I've got the download all ready for everyone.

Aw, shit! Thanks, man! (It's late, I'm tired.)

No, no, I added it after you posted. You friggin inspired me.

Just a reminder, Firefox 3 is currently beta.

yeah here are 2 things I don't like about the current beta. One.. the "home" key is now located on the bookmark toolbar. WHY? wasn't it fine where it was? on the NAVIGATION BAR? Now it pushed all my neatly organized bookmarks to the right by one margin. And two... addons/skins... it's all the chaos of patch day on World of Warcraft as everyone is going "why are my ui mods broken!?" same difference.

2 is a nag though, theyll update when v3 hits final.

I just need to figure out how to squash the home key.

you should be able to customize it just like every other button I'd think. Right click somewhere up there and choose customize. Once that is brought up, you should be able to move the buttons around. At least, that's how it works in Firefox 2; I haven't tried Firefox 3 beta.

My home key wasn't in the bookmarks, it was up on the toolbar where it was supposed to be. But I did have to go and find the forward and back buttons. And I can't get support for roboform toolbar on this one yet. Hopefully that is coming soon.

That was changed back last night (Bug 422420 – Revert home button move and related migration code).

The best part of FFx3 is the "awesomebar". They have reworked the URL bar such that you can type a few words, and it checks (1) the URLs of previously-visited pages (2) the page titles of previously-viewed pages (3) the URLs of bookmarked pages and (4) the titles you gave your bookmarks. And it isn't just a leading-word search: typing 'boing mansion' gets me a link to the page Haunted Mansion trufans party after hours in Disneyland - Boing Boing. Oh, it'll also search (5) the tags of bookmarked pages, but I don't do tags.

You have no idea how awesome the awesomebar is until you have a couple weeks of history in there and need to find something you remember seeing a few days ago.

Feel free to ask any other questions, I'm pretty well studied on the changes.

lol haaahahaha.


/flex


I bitch and the internet changes at my whim!

/leet

This.... made me laugh :thumbsup:

Yea firefox is awesome. I will be getting this version now.

And for some reason my school only lets us use IE for the site, so I use it with SAIT and nothing else.

Doesn't seem to like the Google toolbar.

FFx3 doesn't like all sorts of extensions, because the people who write the extensions haven't updated the extensions to the new version, or more likely, haven't updated the specs to note that they still work with the new version.

If you prefer to take the highway to the danger zone, open about:config and set both extensions.checkCompatibility and extensions.checkUpdateSecurity to false (if they don't exist, create them as booleans). Then you can install any extension, but don't complain if they break everything.

I am not noticing any speed increase... in fact it takes longer than the original 2.0.x.x. As for the memory foot print: I see that it uses less resources on start up but it looks to take up just as much RAM as the 2.0.

Edit: Longer start up time.

I just tested it on a second Mac (Mac Mini, 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM) and it's really fast. What machine are you on, Augi?

Windows XP Pro. When I am browsing it seems to speed up from page to page but I have a sneaking suspicion it is prefetching, making it seem faster.

3.0b4 in Ubuntu - the memory footprint is smaller, but browsing doesn't seem noticably faster (to be fair, memory footprint in Ubuntu wasn't that big to begin with). Crashed within the first minute of startup. I've restarted it and have been using it for the past ten minutes or so without issue, so hopefully it was an isolated issue. I do have my old version of Firefox still, just in case.

I gave my system a quick clean (CCleaned it) and it seems to work much better now. Maybe because that was the first time I started it combined with all the trash that accumulates on this little overused laptop.

Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, 2.0GB RAM, by the way

Prefetching went in around 2002, I can't find any reference that it was changed since then.

If you go back, please create a new profile. Versions 2 and 3 don't mix well.

I always thought prefetching was only enabled with the FasterFox add-on.

I found "What is FireFox prefetching?", and it explains that one can edit settings not in the preference screen by opening about:config in a firefox tab. Using prefetch in the filter, one finds what the linked article describes: network.prefetch-next. I have "toggled" the set value and it now says false. To me that implies that prefetching is disabled. Am I wrong?

Sounds right to me. You might need to restart Firefox to get that setting to apply (some are only set on restart).

on my computer, opera (9.5 beta1) is still faster than firefox (3 beta 4)
who cares about memory-usage anyway? like you have 50 tabs opened up all the time.

Actually, I frequently do...probably more :| Not that that's a good thing...I need to work on my internet filter a bit :p

The speed is a side-issue for me. All browsers are fast enough, the bottleneck is the bandwith.

The functionality is what sells me on Firefox. Seriously, try the Awesomebar as I described it above, and tell me you can use any other browser after that.

I certianly care. In Ubuntu I'll typically have 8-10 programs running across various desktops, so it's important to me that the programs I run be as memory-efficient as possible.I may not have 50 tabs open, but as many as 15 isn't unheard of.

I played around with the awesomebar. It's nifty, but I'm not sure I'll have much practical use for it.

I'm currently in my Windows partition and have just updated to the beta here as well. I note that there have been some interface changes to the Windows version that weren't present in the Linux version. Maybe Linux users don't care about eye candy as much? The FF 2.x interface worked just fine for me, so it's not something I'm overly concerned about anyway.

ok, sounds reasonable from your point of view, but be sure that your situation is the exception. most people dont have multiple desktops with ~10 programs running at the same time.

In academics this is quite often the case. The moment I showed my peers Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager, they discovered a whole new mean to slack off in class.

The interface changes are on the Mac, Vista, and XP versions separately, if I remember correctly. This is especially noticable in what they call the "keyhole", the combined back/forward button. They decided not to do this in Linux, because the interfaces vary so much there that they couldn't establish what the base system should look like.

The Keyhole only shows up in Large Icon mode; if you hate it, try Small Icons.

edit: more details at Visual Refresh and Linux (and you?) at Zarro Boogs found.

I gotta say thanks to willravel for the heads up on the Firefox 3 beta. I downloaded it when this thread had 5 posts, and now we're up to 30. It's been an enjoyable browsing experience so far.

so on my macbook pro, the startup time is slower than Safari but the browsing speed is much faster.

On Vista its faster I would say than IE7 or Firefox2 but I can't get it to display video from Windows Media Player 11. It does it just fine in Firefox2 and when I go to the place it tells me to install the missing plugin, I download it and I already have it. I've tried repairing and reinstalling and still nothing. It's weird because it works just fine in OSX with the Flip4Mac plugin.

I think it does run and load a little faster but I can't get it to run MP either. So I'm closing out anytime I want to watch video content and opening up the old version.

Actually mine was a bit funny with the flip4mac plugin. Normally it looks like like Quicktime, but when I opened a video, there was no frame, nor was there a play button, drop down, or bar showing the progress of the video.

Hmm.

I've been using this for a few days now, and for the most part it is good. But the one thing that is aggravating me beyond belief is when I click on the down arrow on the urlbar to access sites that I have previously typed in the urlbar and it shows all of my bookmarks and has the description of the page in a big font. How do I get rid of this, and go back to the old way of just having the url names that have been typed?

How do you get rid of it? Go back to Firefox 2.

I have trouble dragging images to my desktop, actually.

Has anybody else noticed that their spell check is broken in FF 3? Is this just me? I'm very annoyed by it.

It seemed to work on Mac OS X. I'm sure it will be repaired in a bug fix considering how important a feature it is.

Bug 414201 – JPEG images dragged to the Finder have their file extensions changed to .jfif (Mac only)? It was fixed on Thursday, so try a nightly or wait for the next RC.

The design of it has changed slightly, the bold is gone and the font size is a bit smaller, but it is still 2 lines tall. And it still has your bookmarks and visited pages listed as well.

Instead of just hitting the down arrow, begin typing some words; either URL or page title or something. It should show up very quickly. See my link above regarding the Awesomebar.

Also, they just changed the frecency algorithm to give more weight to manually-typed URLs, but that's post the current RC, only in nightlies.

I have not heard any issues with spellcheck on the Mozilla forums. What OS?

Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10). Upon further investigation I have discovered that the spell check works in Pidgin and Thunderbird (v 2.0.0.12) as well as having worked in Firefox 2.x, but does not appear to work in Firefox 3.0b4 or in Openoffice.org; I'm suspecting it may be a dictionary issue and will look into that.

EDIT - I have resolved the issue with Openoffice.org (it was set to use a Canadian dictionary, which isn't available) but am still having problems with FF 3.0b4 when it comes to spell checking. I've been unable to find a similar option in either the Preferences menu or about:config, so it turns out it may be something specific to Firefox after all.

EDIT #2 - Switched back to FF 2.0.0.12 to confirm, spell checking works fine here. I think I may just stick with the release version and leave the beta for now, at least until the next RC.