Firefox 3 Beta 3
Blogged on February 14th, 2008 at 4:37pmWow, this is impressive. The improved rendering engine of the browser suddenly makes everything seem a lot more vibrant in terms of colour, load much faster and performs some nice little rebalancing effects for colour with Cairo. I’m excited!
The only thing I’m worried about is the edition of the “Smart Bookmarks” folder to my bookmarks toolbar. It’s automatically been populated by my most visited sites, which makes me wonder whether I knew that previous versions of Firefox were collecting my browsing data. A little alarming, especially coming from the browser which is out to let us claim our privacy back.
I miss my plugins, but whatever. The only glitch I saw when installing was the fact I couldn’t scroll all the way to the bottom to see the entire list of plugins that were disabled (all of ‘em, but you can get a fix that forces them to become enabled)
Memory usage has been improved, I’m currently using 70MB out of 2048MB as opposed to between 120MB and 160MB with 6 tabs open.
The UI has been improved, sort of. I don’t like the buttons that much for back and forward, and the reload button looks tacky. I’m glad they kept the stop button the same. I hope a theme developer releases a V2 look soon.
Bookmarking pages is nice - with the button on the address bar. It would be nice if you could have something which fades to say “Page bookmarked”, though.
One last thing - I hate the large font for program headings. Sort it out, Mozilla!
Tags: beta, bookmarks, cairo, firefox 3, mozilla, ui