firefox 3 thread

[rubah]

I was wondering if anyone else downloaded beta3 yet? (the one that came out earlier today)

Things that are cool:

1) woohoo, forecast fox works again!
2) the little favicon is a button you can click to determine something or other, whether a site is verified or something. I just like that I can click it. (Actually, if you click through to more information, you can open the page info screen! without even having to right click anything! that's pretty cool)
3) there's an "applications" tab in the preferences, where you can assumably set which applications open what kinds of files.

Things I'm not sure are cool yet
1) the OSX version went to the cocoa (itunes/safari look). I'm not sure how I like it, although it was an inevitability.

Things I do not like:
1) Still no GO button
2) They moved the Home button to the bookmarks toolbar. Why, I don't know. It doesn't even show up in customize toolbars. You have to open customize toolbar when you have the bookmarks toolbar showing to drag it across to the normal toolbar.
3) I think it was like this in beta2, but those little cool arrows at the bottom of forward/back buttons are still gone (you can access the list of sites by right clicking, but I'd like to be able to normal click even a little tiny pixel area :()
4) "View -> Sidebar -> "               CMD + B"
what does cmd+b do? (experience and trial and error tell us it opens the bookmarks sidebar, but it would be nice if it were labelled!)

Memory looks pretty good so far. I haven't had it open very long, but it's still using less memory than Adium, so that's cool 8)

[Quindiana Jones]

I love Forecastfox. That thing slowed my PC like a.....I actually can't think of anything to put there. But yeah, it made it slow. But it was so useful.

[Rantz]

The first thing that hit me was that i didn't like the icons at all. They looked much better in FF 2. Oh well, there's always themes I guess.

I'm okay with the Home button being in bookmarks instead. I guess it makes more sense that way, and I don't use it that much anyway. The new location bar seems decent, and the speed seems better overall. Not having followed the development, I thought there'd be more changes though.

[Araciel]

Teehee you said 'assumably'

I like my firefox the way I have it, and while the beta is cool, all the added stuff mentioned, which is what i noticed, doesn't enhance my experience at all.

[Leeza]

It doesn't seem to have Restore Session. That I do not like. Unless it's an option somewhere and I just can't see it.

I haven't had time to explore anything else other than it doesn't support MeasureIt. This alone will probably make me go back to my previous version.

[Rantz]

I haven't had time to explore anything else other than it doesn't support MeasureIt. This alone will probably make me go back to my previous version.

Yeah, I'll probably at least stay with v2 until v3 released in a stable version and the majority of my add-ons are supported.

[rubah]

it definitely has restore session, leeza. Go to preferences, general 'restore tabs on start up' or whatever. It's the very first option I think.

[Leeza]

I can't find it, rubah.

[o_O]

Tools > Options > Main > Startup, Leeza. :p

Firefox3 is looking good so far. Since beta 2 they've improved Javascript 1.8 support (see <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=273497">here</a>) and significantly ironed stuff out with the SVG image format (see <a href="http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/svgtetris/svgtetris.svg">here</a>, <a href="http://files.myopera.com/orinoco/svg/USStates.svg">here</a>, <a href="http://starkravingfinkle.org/projects/demo/svg-bubblemenu-in-html.xml">here</a> and <a href="http://www.amaltas.org/svgapp/">here</a> - these are amazing). They have also smoothed out some bugs in AJAX support (see <a href="http://developer.mozilla.org/presentations/eich-ajax-experience-2007/">here</a>), but I can't find the page I really wanted to test AJAX on - one where you could drag photographs around and resize/rotate them.

EDIT: Found it in my IRC logs of all places. :p
<a href="http://developer.mozilla.org/presentations/eich-ajax-experience-2007/photos.svg">AJAX stuff</a>. Looks like it's still broken, unfortunately, 'cause that is one of the best examples. It renders correctly in Firefox2, though, I believe.
EDIT2: Looks like <a href="http://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/demos/photos.svg">Vladimir fixed it</a>, but didn't deploy the fixed script. :p

I've still come across a bug with certain WYSIWIG in-browser editors coded in Javascript though. Also, the aggressive memory management in Firefox3 is great. :p

[crono_logical]

I haven't checked out EoFF 3.0 in Firefox 3 yet :{

[Peegee]

I don't get new things until it's a seamless transition. I'm an old grouchy man that way.

[Yamaneko]

I don't care enough to make the switch.

[Leeza]

Thank you, o_O. :)

[Nominus Experse]

I like my unsupported extensions too much to make the switch just yet.

[Shoeberto]

EDIT: Found it in my IRC logs of all places. :p
<a href="http://developer.mozilla.org/presentations/eich-ajax-experience-2007/photos.svg">AJAX stuff</a>. Looks like it's still broken, unfortunately, 'cause that is one of the best examples. It renders correctly in Firefox2, though, I believe.
EDIT2: Looks like <a href="http://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/demos/photos.svg">Vladimir fixed it</a>, but didn't deploy the fixed script. :p
Those are SVGs? Holy geeze the tech jumped ahead without me having a clue.

[o_O]

Those are SVGs? Holy geeze the tech jumped ahead without me having a clue.

The images themselves are just 1024x768 jpegs; the rounded rectangles are the SVGs. Vladimir uses Javascript 1.8 to handle the translation, rotation and scaling of the jpegs and SVGs, and AJAX to update the screen all in realtime. It's extremely inventive programming. :p

I think that with things like <a href="http://www.amaltas.org/svgapp/">this</a> being possible, this browser is a huge step towards actual browser applications. Pretty soon, I think we'll be seeing entire business systems being run simply from a web browser.