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.