Firefox 3 beta and Browsers in General
Posted on February 10, 2008
5 Comments
I’ve been mulling over browsers again lately… some random thoughts follow.
Firefox Beta 3
I tried Firefox 3 Beta 2 for a few days (initial mention), but I’m afraid I’ve had to set it aside. I experimented with enabling assorted extensions but had too many stability issues — and frankly, Firefox without extensions just isn’t all that useful or interesting to me.
Some folks have reported that the beta is very fast. I’m afraid I didn’t notice any difference.
I had some odd screen rendering issues that were a bit of a turn-off too. For instance, the borders on form field combo boxes wouldn’t show up. Sometimes the outer borders around the new location bar wouldn’t show either (but not always). Perhaps that’s all related to my system and/or (new) video card, but odd that I’ve never seen such behaviors before.
I did really dig that new location bar stuff though! It is pretty dang slick and easy to get used to.
Back to Regular Firefox
After the beta experiment I went back to the release 2.x version of Firefox. Unfortunately, it has become very unstable and crashes a lot. I think I’ll need to kill my profile and start over — perhaps the beta corrupted something?
After I’m done writing this I’ll uninstall all the Firefox stuff and start over to see if things stabilize. For now, I only use it when I need Firebug.
Onwards to Internet Explorer 7
Since I was having Firefox issues, I decided to give Internet Explorer 7 another shot as main browser.
Tip: If you use IE7 be sure to grab the IE7 pro add-on. Without it, you’re just missing out.
In general, IE7 worked well for me with just a few niggling issues. The main one being that when it is busy loading a page, don’t even bother trying to open a new tab and do something else… time just seems to stop.
I also struggle a bit with sometimes links open in tabs (as expected) but other times they open a new window (not desired).
Serviceable but … meh, it just wasn’t great.
A Short Peek at Safari
I’ve dabbled a bit with Apple’s Safari 3 beta for Windows. First released in June, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Handy to have around to see how sites will look in Safari though.
I love it on my work laptop. It seems to really like the Core2 Duo processor and at that high of a resolution (1920×1200) it truly looks great!
It doesn’t fare so well on the rest of my “lesser” machines though. On the older stuff it seems sluggish and looks damned blurry.
Fun to play with, but not a primary browser for me yet.
Opera 9.50 beta
Opera’s version 9.5 beta of “kestrel” is what I turned to next — and seems to be on the way to being my favorite. It runs nicely on all my machines, from the Core2 Duo Vista laptop down to the P3 750 Windows 2000 laptop.
What I like the most:
- Fast launch and fast rendering
- Speed Dial (that link is a little video overview link) I still love this feature.
- Synchronization - my speed dial, link bar and bookmarks are in sync on all my PCs using Opera — including Opera Mini on mobile devices.
Downsides? I’ve found two so far.
- The WordPress WYSIWYG editor continues to not work so well with Opera (one example). This may be resolved by the new version of TinyMCE included in the upcoming 2.5 release however.
- Can’t send Pownce messages. They just… disappear!
What puzzles me? I still haven’t found a great use for the Opera Widgets. Just seems kinda weird… but maybe something will jump out at me as I experiment with those a bit more.
Other than that, it seems to be working well with all my usual sites. I’m liking it. Location bar is similar to FF3’s too, which is cool.
Oh, final cool note: You know how browsers offer to save the name/password combo you just entered? Opera doesn’t stop and wait when that dialog is up. In other words, you can wait a couple seconds and make sure you entered the password correctly. 
What’s your favorite browser — and why?
Tags: beta, browsers, firefox, IE7, IE7Pro, opera, safari
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5 Responses to “Firefox 3 beta and Browsers in General”
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I have tried them all. I still end up coming back to IE7. I’m sorry to break it to everyone, IE7 loads faster than all the other browsers. (even though Apple claims Safari is the world’s fastest browser - it’s not)
Firefox used to be fast, what happened? What did they do to break it? This partly caused me to switch to IE, along with the memory usage.
Of course IE has its issues, just as any other browser does. I used to love using Opera, but I ran into too many sites that I had to open in either IE or Firefox. I don’t like using multiple browsers (with the exception of Prism for web applications).
Fortunately, I have not run into the issue with ‘time stopping’ when trying to load another tab while one is loading.
I do like how Safari doesn’t look as cluttered as other browsers do, but it’s just another browser to add to the growing list.
Here’s an interesting tidbit to tack on…
As I mentioned in the article, I uninstalled both version of Firefox (2.0.12 and FF3 beta2) and then deleted the Mozilla data under App Settings. I then re-installed FF3.
DANG! It goes zoomy fast now. I wonder if I just had a few years of cruft and old extensions gumming up the works?
I’ve found FF3 to be much, much faster than FF2, and they seem to have fixed the horrible horrible memory leak too. Plus, the location bar is great - I’ve been using FF3 since alpha 8 or so, and when I have to go back to FF2 for some extensions I miss it so.
Plus, the native UI is a nice touch. I’ve always found Opera to look strange, whether I’m using it on Windows, Linux or OS-X. But, I guess I’m just shallow that way.
Heyas Adam - Since I uninstalled old versions and manually clobbered the old directories, I’d say I agree with your assessment of FF3 beta.
VROOM.
I’m still not sure about beta 3’s native UI though…