November 2007

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for download from the Mozilla Developer Center.

I’ve been playing with it for a few hours and can make the following observations:

1. It’s fast
2. Virtually none of the extensions have yet been ported (understandably), but 2 of my favourites - Roboform and Stumbleupon - work fine. This may explain 1. above
3. It’s leaving a smaller footprint than Firefox 2. FF3’s been running for about 4 hours and is running at about 100Mb. FF2 after that time would’ve been at least 250Mb. So, it looks like they’re starting to address the memory leaks. Of course, the lack of extensions also means a lack of memory leaks from them, which helps.

Visually, it’s pretty much identical to Firefox 2.

Well worth a look as a first Beta and it’ll been interesting to see how it develops.