Firefox 3 Beta 5

This is the first time I tried writing a blog from my Moto Q. It’s not too bad for straight text, but anything fancy might take a little extra effort

What I really want to talk about here is Firefox 3 Beta 5. I’ve been waiting for Firefox 3 to come out ever since I discovered the memory leak problem in version 2 and read that they wouldn’t fix this problem until version 3. I decided to jump the gun and try the latest beta version on my Mac. During the install, Firefox scans your existing plug ins, checks if they are compatible, and if not tries to download versions that are compatible. Only 2 of my 6 or 7 plug ins have compatible versions, so I was immediately stuck without some functionality that I was used to. This is one of the reasons I decided to install Firefox on my Mac – I don’t use it much for web browsing, so any problems would be manageable.

After the install, I noticed that Firefox 3 looks just like a Mac application in form and function. I read that the developers did this for the Windows and Linux versions as well. The version I tested was very stable and only crashed after I installed the logmein plug in for Firefox and attempted to connect to a computer. I imagine this was because the plug in is not compatible with version 3. The other thing I noticed was when you type in a web address and Firefox gives you a list of previously typed in addresses, it now includes the web page name above the typed url. This made finding the correct url easier and just looked cool.

That’s about all I saw from a couple of days of using Firefox 3. The beta definitely makes me excited about the new version and I’m sure many plug in issues will be fixed when the final version 3 browser is released or shortly thereafter.

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