PRAKHAR AGRAWAL’S TECH BLOG

Mozilla released yesterday the second beta for Firefox 3 with some 900 bug fixes and improvements over the previous version, including some new features, user interface enhancements and more.

High on the list of priorities for many users is tightening up Firefox’s memory usage and beta 2 shows Firefox 3 continues to squash and eliminate the memory leak bugs. The “what’s new” page for Firefox 3 beta 2 says that over 300 memory leaks have been plugged since Firefox 2, with 30 of those coming since the release of beta 1. The release notes also claim that Firefox 3’s memory footprint has been significantly reduced.

Some comments:

• Perhaps the most striking change is the redesigned Location Bar autocomplete menu, which now highlights which parts of the page title and/or URL match the entered text … <http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=22782>
• Improved security features such as: protection from cross-site JSON data leaks, tighter restrictions on site-specific content using effective TLD service, better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, version checking for insecure plugins … <http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2007/12/18/firefox-3-beta-2-now-available-for-download/>
• [Improved in Beta 2!] Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 2, and will show further gains in future Beta releases … <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b2/releasenotes/>
• There are of course some known issues which you might want consider before upgrading. Firefox 3 is still a beta after all. For instance, the new versions of Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail are both a mess in Firefox 3, though the classic versions work just fine. A rather annoying bug in beta 1 on OS X, which causes the CTRL-L shortcut (and occasionally the mouse as well) to not actually put the cursor in the location bar appears to still be around in beta 2.However, despite some bugs here and there I’ve been using beta 1 as my primary browser since it was released and have had no problems with it crashing or leaking memory. The speed is phenomenal compared to Firefox 2 and with the second beta out the door Firefox 3 is shaping up to be the best browser since, well, Firefox 2.

  Here’s the new Places Manager in action (note that I’m using the Proto theme for OS X):

  The new location bar makes finding visited and bookmarked sites much easier than previous versions:

  

  The Firefox 3 Download Manager now lets you see not just where a file is, but where it came from and more:

  …  for full article <http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/12/firefox-3-beta.html>