
After months and months of talk the first public beta of the upcoming Firefox 3 is finally here. Like many I rushed right out this morning and downloaded it, because it’s a public beta, that means it’s got to be about done right? Maybe not so much. At first glance I can’t really tell it’s all that different from FF2, the interface does seem a bit sleeker but it’s hard to say. I guess I was expecting something drastically different. It does seem a lot more responsive than FF2 for opening large number of tabs but that might be because most plugins don’t work with it yet.Apparently not very many plugins aren’t working yet so it looks like I’ll have to do without StumbleUpon and CustomizeGoogle for a bit. Ummm, no, that’ll probably be enough reason to switch back to FF2 for now. So be warned, if you’ve heavily customized your FF then you may want to use an alternate machine to test the new beta because it totally overwrites the older version. It now installs into a new folder separate from FF2, so they can both co-exist on the same machine. Beyond that, it seems pretty good, based on only a few hours messing with it. The biggest thing people will want to know is, does it still leak memory like a rusty boat? According to the release notes over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged.
Again, it’s hard to tell but this early look definitely has some promise to it. If your into ripping new software apart to find all it’s faults then you might want to give this a whirl. Otherwise, your probably better off just reading one of the in depth reviews that are starting to turn up. It’s worth a look but like I said, if you don’t want to lose any customizations you currently have, better to just sit this one out and wait and see.
A more in depth review is available from Zdnet.com, check it out.
You can download the beta here
They are now at Beta 2.