Firefox 3, Beta 4 hits the streets

[cro-man]

Mozilla today released a new beta version of Firefox 3. Beta 4 builds on the existing releases of Firefox and includes more than 900 enhancements from the Beta 3 and includes 'drastic improvements to performance and memory use.' It also provides other fixes based on feedback from the community.

Mozilla recommend that the developer preview release of Firefox is only to be used for testing purposes, and shouldn't be put in production environments just yet. If you're game, you can get it here.

The biggest problem you're likely to run into is incompatibility with the many and varied add-ons for Firefox. So if you run a lot of them, it might pay to check whether your favourites are updated for 3.0 compatibility yet.

[MrNxDmX]

I cant wait for its final release. I liked firefox v1.x, love v2.x, and i'm sure same will be for v3.x.

My choice is Portable version to go with everytime and everywhere

Thanks for info.

[JurgenDoe]

Nice News again Cro-man. I'll wait till all my addons for FF2 will work with FF3

[ccl0]

It also provides other fixes based on feedback from the community.

i hope they 'fixed' the look of it. i greatly dislike how they changed the look from ff2. bleh :angry:

[Mr.Thunderbird]

Ey Cro-man, Beta 5 is out

[cro-man]

Ey Cro-man, Beta 5 is out

Improved Performance

* [improved in Beta 5!] Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 5, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.

* Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.

* Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.

:dribble:

Edited April 12, 2008 by cro-man

[NIM]

How many betas there will be for this version of FF???

[ccl0]

How many betas there will be for this version of FF???

if i remember right, i think this will be the last one followed by two release candidates and then the final will be out sometime in june or july

[Mr.Thunderbird]

Wow, that's a LONG path for a webbrowser!

[NIM]

Wow, that's a LONG path for a webbrowser!

Yes, and when Microsoft has a road like that for one OS, then everybody's spitting on them, but when Mozilla has such a long path for a browser, everything's normal and cool, just because firefox is free

[Mr.Thunderbird]

Of course, that's how it's supposed to be.

But whoa, first MINEFIELD (the pre-beta release of FF3), then all these betas and then RCs! I hope it's going to be big...

Edited May 3, 2008 by Mr.Thunderbird

[Mr.Thunderbird]

I just found a 'secret feature' on my Firefox3B5 Ubuntu installation...

Try selecting some text, then go to some place in Firefox where you can type text (Search Bar, Address Bar..) and press the middle mouse button (mouse3, press the mouse wheel). and it will paste the previous selected text!

[ccl0]

its now reached rc 1 stage

* Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.

* Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.

* Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability.

* Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.

http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index...e-for-download/

edit: i dont know what improvements they made to the user interface, but its still ugly as ever =/

Edited May 19, 2008 by ccl0

[NIM]

I've installed it and it seems that it's even faster than it was in beta stages?

Is it just me or..?

[ccl0]

ugh.. anyone know how to revert to the ff2 way of typing in the address bar? when you type an address and it attempts to auto-fill the rest? i greatly dislike the new method ff3 has implemented.