Firefox 3 Review
Firefox 3 has been in the making for a while now. I have been using beta 4 (Windows). There are a lot of nice changes in Firefox 3. First of all, it’s memory footprint is actually smaller than that of Firefox 2.x (in my experience). It is also slightly faster at rendering pages, especially pages that use heavy JavaScript, which is the norm today.
The next thing that I noticed after opening Firefox 3 was the reformed address bar. When you start typing in an address (or tags, which I will cover later), it acts as a keyworded search rather than a simple address bar. Many people dislike this feature. I had to adjust to it and I am still unsure whether I like it or not. Below is an example of this keyword search. (Click to enlarge)
Firefox has finally added in tags for bookmarks. It seems that “tagging” is the “thing to do” today. Slashdot and Engadget recently added tags and it seems like everyone else is beginning to implement some sort of tagging system. Firefox now allows you to tag your bookmarks so that when you type in key words in the address bar, your tagged bookmarks are easier to find. (Click to enlarge)
Firefox has also made a change that I have been wanting for years. Now, you can close the download window without canceling downloads. They simply download in the background, as long as Firefox is kept open. A status message is displayed in the bottom taskbar of Firefox, telling the user how many downloads are active and an estimate of how long it will take for all of them to complete. (Click to enlarge)
The last major change that I have noticed in Firefox 3 is that it now allows you to save your tabs, so that when you open Firefox again, it restores all of the pages that you had open. This is also a much-wanted feature of mine. (Click to enlarge)
In summary, Firefox 3 has progressed a long ways. I have not noticed any major bugs in the beta version. I do not feel that Firefox 3 has added much bloat at all. All of the features that I have seen enhance the user experience.
Looking forward to Firefox 3 Beta 5.
Firefox 3 Beta 5 has progressed farther in complying with CSS and HTML standards. This is evident by its Acid 3 test results. Acid 3 is a test that tests for HTML and CSS compliance. For reference, the Acid 3 test page in Internet Explorer 7 is completely unreadable. There are 5-6 lines of text directly on top of each other.
At any rate, I have tried out the nightly build that will become Firefox 3 Beta 5 within a day or two (so it’s basically Beta 4.95) and it gets a 71/100 (Click to enlarge):
I have one last thing to add. The new betas of Opera and of Safari now display the Acid 3 test 100% correctly. Firefox is now playing catch-up.
March 28th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
nice review. got to see some of the details of firefox 3 others haven’t talked about. This tagging feature sounds nice if its implemented nicely. The acid 3 is disappointing though, though I heard firefox 3 does well with acid 2 tests.
March 28th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Thanks for the comment. I am disappointed about the Acid 3 test. I guess I figured that Firefox adhered to more of the standards than they actually do. I just checked and Acid 2 works perfectly on Firefox 3 Beta 4.
June 10th, 2008 at 1:30 am
[...] also want to report that the Acid 3 test still ends on 71/100, as it did in Beta 5. (See my previous review of Beta 4 and Beta 5) Since the trees are locked down, we can expect that Firefox 3 RTM will not correctly display the [...]