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Firefox 3 Beta 1 Review

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the download-yours-today dept.

DaMan writes "The newly-released Firefox 3 beta 1 has been reviewed by ZDnet and the verdict is that it is good. 'Is Firefox 3.0 going to be better? Given what I'm seeing so far, I think so. Why? Because it looks like Mozilla have gone back to basics and worked on what really matters to users — security, speed and ease of use ... Everything about Firefox 3.0 beta 1 is fast. The download package is small which means that it comes in fast, the installation is fast, the browser fires up fast, pages and tabs open fast, the browser shuts down fast, and the uninstall process is fast and painless.'"

3 of 588 comments (clear)

  1. great! by wwmedia · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    i certainly hope they fixed the memory leak "features"

    but its too late for me i already jumped the boat

  2. Speed would be great by Junky191 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I thought the whole point of firefox was a faster rewrite of the slow bloated old Mozilla browser? These days it's one of the worst examples of bloatware around, it's painfully slow and heavyweight, IE7 smokes it in this regard. If it weren't for firebug I'll bet lots of people would be using Safari/IE7 instead.

    It's pretty bad and slow on it's own, but it gets far worse when you start to use extensions of course, some protections against all the painfully slow and memory-leaking extensions people are churning out would be great

    Also, if so much attention is supposedly being paid to creating good cross-platform code and features, why has it never worked properly in Linux? Crashes, memory leaks, and dear god don't even try to install any extensions, it's a lost cause. I had to spend all day yesterday hacking out custom Linux FF CSS to get a simple, standards-compliant page that looked perfect in FF on Windows to render consistently when a FF on a couple of distros suddenly became a client requirement.

    I hate to come across as flamebait, but sometimes I really think something is fundamentally dysfunctional among the decision making process with Firefox. It used to be terrific, but slowly became a prime example of bloatware, and it seems to be getting worse with every release.

  3. Re:I've been using Camino... by HeroreV · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Pity there's not a similar lightweight native Firefox derivative for Windows. It's entirely reasonable to not know that a native Gecko-based browser exists for Windows, but it is complete idiocy to assume such a thing doesn't exist simply because you've never heard of it.

    BTW, Firefox is basically just a front-end for Gecko. If you want to make a browser that uses native widgets, you're not going to start with Firefox. Camino, K-Meleno, Galeon, and other browsers with native front-ends are not derived from Firefox.