Firefox 3 beta 5 mini Review
Firefox 3 beta 5 is shipping soon or maybe already shipped, either way I got my hands on it today to play around. It’s much further along then the last 3 beta I tried (2,3?). Extensions don’t work and never will unless each extension developer updates their stuff to either tell firefox it is compatible or actual code changes to make it happen. I’m not a fan of the architect of their compatibility system, I think things should try to work and if not let you know an extension broke firefox and let you disable it. Microsoft Outlook does this very well.
Fast
Firefox 3 beta 5 is silly fast, so much so that I was browsing an internal web app today, thinking, "hey who ajaxified this thing?". Turns out the web app is still doing traditional post backs but FF is so fast you can’t tell, the screen never "refreshes" only by looking at the green loading indicator at the bottom can you tell.
Gmail has become paininfully slow on FF 2. With FF 3, the thing is blazing fast again. You know the FF & Google guys must be working on things together like this. Gmail search is still slow though.
Memory
Better then FF 2 which is a memory hog but still not great, it easily got up to 100 mb after an hour of using (2-3 tabs open at once).
Conclusion
I’d be using this thing as my main browser if my extensions would all work, at last I’m back to FF 2 because I’m tied to my extensions.
Written by Tim on April 2nd, 2008 with
11 comments.
Read more articles on tools and web 2.0 ish.
- [+] Digg: Feature this article
- [+] Del.icio.us: Bookmark this article
- [+] Furl: Bookmark this article
Frank
#1. April 2nd, 2008, at 7:29 PM.
You can use non-compatible extensions with firefox 3 beta versions by disabling the compatibility screening in the about:config. I’m not sure what the exact entry is, but I have been using a number of extensions in FF3 with no problems.