Intro

Firefox changed my browsing experience completely - it was simply amazing for me and i loved being able to leave IE 6. Since then i have not looke back and at the momnent My Firefox 2 has gone through counbtless ours of tweaking so i;'ve got it just how it like it.

And then i was asked to Beta Test Firefox 3, Beta 1 (my cuz arranged it i believe). So far F3B1 (Firefox 3 - Beta 1) had been a complete disaster in my honest opinion. Sure it looked different and felt new - but it was unstable as hell. Crashed every time i loaded up 3 tabs at once.

Beta 2 is quite a different story

The Good

• Feels smoother, the interface has some nice new tweaks to refine and make the experience better
  • When you type in the url of something in your address bar, it searchers your history and displays items that have that description as well as URL
  • Smart Bookmarks - Recently Viewed, Most Visited etc. - its a nice touch
  • Flyout menu's - Instead of the dialog box - many things (like password wizard) come out as a nice flyout menu
• Less of a resource hog - F2 seemed to be hogging close to 100 --> 350 MB RAM at times - which made it a son of a b**** on my old PC which only had 500 MB of RAM on it. F3 is much better - when using about 20 tabs it peacked at 200 MB - Big improvement
• Its as customizable as the predecessor (give it time and the plugins will role in)

The Bad

• Instability - all too frequent crashes - but this will be ironed out soon
• Attention - the flyout menus are nice, but a bit too discreet - ie no sound effect to show that it is noticed
• Doesn't offer that much new - but hey its Beta 2 and rumors are affloat about new features. I'm still hoping

Final Comments

Its got the making of another great browser. With the main issue about resouirces sorted out, the door is wide open. Just need to sort out the instability and hopefulluy add some new goodness for us tro play with (or for modder to add in ).

THis is gonna be good

~~~ RenegadeNukes out (soz LoM - guess i borrowed this)

Yea they should rename it to Firefox Fail.

Yes it has potential, however atm it crashes too much. Luckily this is still a beta

I honestly believe some people do not comprehend the concept of Alpha, Beta and release candidates.

I concur with you there sir.

Something is released in alpha/beta so that the bugs can be removed for the _final_ version. If the final one crashes and gives shit the whole time, then yes, it is a problem. But I read they have fixed something like 12k bugs for this firefox. So it should actually be one of the most stable ever. Ever.

I have it running on one of my pc's so I can test the look of pages I am developing (Flash, Ajax, loads of JS), and so far it is an improvement. I frequently have lockups when a page is loading a lot of ajax stuff, but never in FF3. So let's wait for the _final_ release before the bashing begins of how it fails and how buggy it is or what it lacks.

Indeed. Things can do a complete 360 from beta to final build so let's hang on a bit.

Give the guy a break. Frequent crashes in a Beta version is still a con. It is still something to mention.

FF2 is a bit slow to my liking, especially when saving images the whole browser seems to freeze up. (NO not THAT kind of images. The images from the "funny pictures" threads on this forum :-) )

Well they claim the memory leak issues from FF2 will be resolved so hopefully your 'funny pictures' will load no problem

One huge gripe I do have with FF, and it might actually be Windows related; When saving something and I chose to browse for it, it sometimes crashes FF.

Maybe it's Explorer not being able to handle it or something, but it can be quite frustrating

A deep look into beta 3.