Firefox 3 on Mac OSX

[afuna_archive]

I'm trying out Firefox 3(.0b3) right now! I decided to download it on a whim; I was hoping that it would be less of a memory hog than Firefox 2. Because trying to run that plus Aptana (Ruby IDE) at the same time was bogging down my system horribly. For the record, it seems to be running more smoothly, but the test may not be fair since most of my extensions were disabled for being incompatible *g*

I love the new features, including the improved downloads interface, additional interfaces (such as the new Applications item, which is the filetype-to-action mapping) and what look to be better error messages. One of my favorite things is that there is now a shortcut for the JavaScript console. It may not seem like much, but the inefficient way to open the JavaScript console has always been one of those little things that irritated me to no end.

It is somewhat strange to see the form controls be styled like Safari's. And the window is a darker gray than I'm used to. I am not enamoured, but I guess I'll get used to them.

There are a few rough spots; sometimes the rendering is weird and elements show up in the wrong place on the page (the header for Vertigo does this often on the Explore page). Also, the cmd+shift+T shortcut does not seem to always work; I often have to use the menu instead. I'm hoping that these kinks will be worked out by the time it makes it to release.

I'm excited about their moving the preferences storage backend to SQLite instead of writing to the textfile (prefs.js) only when closing the browser properly. I think this affects the values saved by Greasemonkey as well; if so, then that means I won't lose the data from the current session if the browser suddenly crashes. I am almost tempted to try to crash something so I can test :-)

I'm also excited about the improved search and bookmarking (with tags) functions -- searching through the address bar brings up results based on the address, the page title, bookmarks, bookmark tags, and I'm finding it pretty useful. (For example, when doing Support work, I can just type "entryprops" and get the URL I want, instead of having to type "livejournal.com/admi...", selecting whatever URL comes up, then deleting the end and triggering autocomplete again with "entr..."). There's also apparently auto-resume for downloads, though I have not tested it yet.

Comments

[idonotlikepeas]

FF3 is just nifty in general. I hope it gets to release relatively soon.

[afuna]

Me too, then maybe some of my favorite extensions would update to support it (I know I can use the version-hack, but still!)

[av8rmike.livejournal.com]

I've been testing FF3 portable from portableapps.com, and if it weren't for the fact that some of the extensions don't work, I'd upgrade my home PC. The address bar thing is so cool, in that I only have to type in "layersource" to get to previously visited layers.

[afuna]

Haha, yes. I use it to access all my tools. No need to remember whether it's /admin/support or /support or /admin. \o/