James Burgess

So, everyone’s been talking about Firefox 3, but I’ve been uncharacteristically late jumping on the beta bandwagon.  In the past, I’ve been seen hitting F5 continuously whilst waiting for a beta to be uploaded on launch day - but this time around, things are different.  Firefox 3 Beta 5 will be the first beta of Fx3 I’ve even given the time of day to.  My main reason for this is that, currently, a few add-ons are all that is keeping me using Fx - as I much prefer the frequent WebKit update builds for Safari, but they just lack those few features I require for my browsing satisfaction (things like PDF download, etc.)

I’ve got a lot riding on Fx3 - if it’s good, I’ll keep using it… but if it’s not, then I’ll be making the jump to Safari/WebKit once and for all (at least until Fx4).  With this in mind, I headed off and downloaded b5 and install it on OS X (haven’t used it on Windows, yet), to see what all the fuss was about - and this post summarises what I found.

The primary concern with Fx2, for me (and most other users), is/was the memory usage.  Fx2 leaks memory everywhere.  It’s a bit like using a colander to sail across the Atlantic, you don’t get very far before you find you’re sinking.  Leave Fx2 running overnight, and you can easily come back to about 90% memory usage in the morning (or a crashed Fx/computer).  This was obviously a big flaw that needed addressing, and it seems to have been adequately fixed - Fx3 just purrs along nicely in the background, and is more like a racing catamaran.

I really like some of the new functionality/UI design combinations, with things like the improvements to the recent URLs section under the address bar, and the ability to bookmark an item with a single click (and also see whether you’ve already bookmarked the page).  The download manager has been improved to include download resuming, amongst other things, though it doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as significantly as some pundits are claiming.

Along with this, there are a plethora of minor usability features - one that is clearly notable to me, which is tab scrolling!  This is a much better than the previous solution, and I think that it will definitely make flicking between tabs a far less tiresome affair.

There are a good number of changes under the hood, with increased security (through various little features, such as the new Website Identity popup, when you click a website’s favicon) and malware prevention techniques and Acid2 compliance, which is really quite a significant step forward.  Shame it doesn’t do Acid3 very well, at all - hopefully we won’t have to wait until Fx4 for that!

Not quite sure what the point of the over-sized back button is, though.  That’s all a bit confusing and, to the naked eye, there seems to be no way to choose how many pages to go back (though a right-click on the button solves that).  Whoever thought that up was a little bit drunk.

Regardless, Fx3 looks promising - I’ll just have to wait and see if it’s enough to keep me using Fx, or whether I’ll switch camps… stay tuned!