Firefox 3 beta 3 expected today

[MrCrispy]

Here's what to expect - http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/02/a-deep-look-to-firefox-3-beta-3/

A new FF is always good news, since its probably one of the most used apps for a lot of people. For the main concern is extension compatibility. I like the new Places feature for bookmarks and I'm hoping for del.icio.us integration.

edit by jgpaiva: added image

[jgpaiva]

I must say, even though I'm an opera lover, there are some interesting features there that i hope my favourite browser will gracefully copy

[Fedorov]

I've been running nightly windows builds of FF3 for a few months now - I'm still shocked at how stable this is, I yet to see it crash in all these months, works perfect almost! Very fast rendering speeds, page zoom is nice and lots of other small features that really make it a nice upgrade.

[f0dder]

How is application load speed compared to FF2? That's one of my main gripes with FF...

[Renegade]

How is application load speed compared to FF2? That's one of my main gripes with FF...

You mean your gripe wasn't that 1 instance of Firefox opened to "about:blank" could eventually soak up a half GB of RAM?

[f0dder]

How is application load speed compared to FF2? That's one of my main gripes with FF...

You mean your gripe wasn't that 1 instance of Firefox opened to "about:blank" could eventually soak up a half GB of RAM?

Nope, never had that bad memory leaks for me - but of course I tend to close firefox between each read-forum-topics-and-follow-trails-of-links spree

[Lashiec]

Christ, they kept the ugly icons. Damn you Mozilla Corporation and your native theme >_<

Well, memory wise, Chris Blizzard, one of Mozilla's evangelists (the one that doesn't act like a fanboy ) commented various things:

Increasing Firefox's performance and reducing overhead are also very high priorities for Mozilla. Blizzard notes that the developers are making a "huge amount of progress" on memory improvements and says that there are over 300 such improvements in Firefox 3. There are now 100,000 fewer memory allocations at startup time, he says, and the use of a new allocator further increases memory savings. Some of the memory improvements are focused on Linux—for instance, Firefox 3 now uses much less X server memory.

Mozilla's focus for performance improvements is on real world scenarios. Blizzard explains that Mozilla's performance testing and optimization primarily focuses on user-relevant contexts like popular web applications rather than raw benchmarks.

Of course, that could be pure PR. I suppose we'll found out when the browser is out AND the extensions people use are updated for the new API.

Mmmm, raw benchmarks, I wonder if that is a nod to Opera and specially Safari, since the new WebKit version brings substantial performance improvements in JavaScript (again!)

[nontroppo]

I really like what they are doing with Firefox 3 UI wise. Places is simply one of the best treatments of the horrible legacy UI mess of bookmarks/history of any browser period. This is exactly where I think the browser UI should be heading! I would be very happy for Opera to "borrow" as much of this as possible.

The new location bar UI is a step forward, but Opera's in-page indexing inclusions has it beat.

Site preferences are very welcome addition, they make a significant improvement to browser usage.

Lashiec: what performance benchmarks? I've tested the most recent nightly and it is still significantly behind Webkit and Kestrel on most benchmarks. The latest Webkit, at least on some benchmarks is shockingly fast. Its inclusion of the W3C Selectors API makes it 24X faster than Kestrels fastest library performance and 35X faster than Firefox 3's on the Slickspeed benchmark!!!

[urlwolf]

O-O
Has anyone tested webkit on windows?
does it _not_ suck much? (please god!)

[Lashiec]

I really like what they are doing with Firefox 3 UI wise. Places is simply one of the best treatments of the horrible legacy UI mess of bookmarks/history of any browser period. This is exactly where I think the browser UI should be heading! I would be very happy for Opera to "borrow" as much of this as possible.

Indeed. Oslo, start your photocopiers!

Precisely, yesterday I finally decided to organize my bookmarks, and after only 20, I realized that organizing them in folders is pretty much impossible, so I started to dream of a new system in a future 9.6 version (after all, the framework is already present in M2), while I wondered how could we keep the same old system during 10 years, when it was clearly out of fashion the same moment it was introduced. Ah, considering how breezy is to organize music files with the right tools, one can only thank the Mozilla team for using similar ideas, and maintaining the old and new systems together.

Well, at least it's still much easier to organize bookmarks in Opera or Firefox than in IE >_<

Lashiec: what performance benchmarks? I've tested the most recent nightly and it is still significantly behind Webkit and Kestrel on most benchmarks. The latest Webkit, at least on some benchmarks is shockingly fast. Its inclusion of the W3C Selectors API makes it 24X faster than Kestrels fastest library performance and 35X faster than Firefox 3's on the Slickspeed benchmark!!!

I don't really know, that's what Chris Blizzard commented to Ars Technica. I guess he was saying that they focused the development into improving performance within certain AJAX sites (*cough*Yahoo! Mail*cough*) instead of having the fastest engine overall.

[nontroppo]

urlwolf: Webkit is just the rendering engine that powers Safari, so the UI is not what is being tested (it will use the Safari UI you have installed and just swap the engine out). The rendering engine itself works fine on Windows (it doesn't suck, but remember it is a nightly, so every day may give you a new surprise!), slightly slower on the same machine than the OS X version, but still much faster than firefox for just about every rendering test you can imagine, sometimes by an order of magnitude. If you hate Safari for Windows period, then Webkit will look *idential*, it will just offer you all the new rendering goodies they are introducing...

Gecko is showing its age, and I'm hugely skeptical that Mozilla can get its performance anywhere near Webkit and Presto for their mobile project. But as embedded processors get faster, they can hopefull stay still long enough to let the hardware catch up (as happened when Mozilla first emerged all those years ago).