Firefox 3, Beta 2.......

[Stan_Lite]

... Isn't quite there yet.

I downloaded it from Filehippo yesterday and tried it out a bit. There seems to be very little difference to Firefox 2 as far as the interface is concerned, the autocomplete thing has been sexed up a bit and the downloads window has been upgraded a bit but not a lot else has changed. I believe they're working on a new look for it but I'm not sure if there are going to be many more changes in functionality. I was a bit disappointed tbh, I was expecting a lot of changes.
It would appear that most of the changes are "behind the scenes", including increased security and better cookie handling. It's also supposed to be a bit nippier (I haven't noticed it yet but this connection is so slow, any speed improvements may not be particularly noticeable), it remains to be seen whether the final build actually improves the performance.

As far as using it is concerned, it's not quite right yet. Most of my extensions aren't compatible and there are, as yet, not many which have been updated. The most important being Google browser sync and FireFTP - the two I use most.
It has also crashed twice in the 24 hours I've been using it, something the latest build of Firefox 2 hasn't done for many months. It being beta, I have of course, sent the dumps.

Memory usage seems to be pretty much on a par with Firefox 2. With 6 tabs open for 5 minutes, memory usage for both was around the 40Mb mark. Mozilla claim to have plugged a lot of the memory leaks which have plagued previous builds but I haven't been able to test this properly as yet and have not noticed any improvement as far as simple browsing is concerned.

Obviously, 1 day is hardly a sufficient test and I will be using it more for a while to try to see where improvements have been made.

Looks like they still have a bit of work to do to get a stable build.

[petemc]

The biggest improvement imho is colour profile support for images. As a photographer it means that if I save an image in PS with an embedded colour profile FF3 will read that and display the colours as I intended not just in standard sRGB which can sometimes make the image look wrong.

[Stan_Lite]

"Yes Lisa, Daddy's a teacher"

/Homer

I'll take your word for it Pete, gobbledygook to me

[petemc]

lol Basically photos look as they should

[Haly]

Originally Posted by petemc

lol Basically photos look as they should

So it's only my eyes that will let me down now?

[petemc]

I don't think theres an extension for that

[LeperousDust]

*Ahem* weren't you trying Opera stan ?

[Stan_Lite]

Originally Posted by LeperousDust

*Ahem* weren't you trying Opera stan ?

I was but it kept crashing on me too (the 9.50 beta).

I thought I'd try FF3 since the beta was available and maybe make my choice once stable versions of both were available. I'm keeping an open mind as FF3 isn't as good as I thought it was going to be. If the final release isn't much better than FF2, I may well switch to Opera (assuming the final release is as good as the beta looks).

[Daz]

I'm waiting for an RC before I look at FF3. Not really looking for much out of it, but if the under the hood changes make it faster, lighter on memory and more secure (I hear the anti-phising stuff should be pretty comprehensive), then I'll probably switch over.