Topic: Firefox 3 is out...

[WindAndConfusion]

Not officially, but RC3 is finalized. You can download it here, or you can download the official 3.0 final release in a few hours and be part of a useless publicity stunt.

[scottws]

I've had FF 3b5 installed on my laptop for some time.  The only difference I notice is that the auto-suggestions when you type a URL show both the URL and the page title, and a favicon if there is one.

I know it uses a new, supposedly better rendering engine and I think it supports more of the CSS specs than FF 2 did.  But I just don't notice a difference.

[Ghandi]

I just upgraded to RC2 from b5. I was waiting because I didn't want my addons to be incompatible, but most of them work now and I forced about 5 of them to work by overriding their compatibility.

That auto-suggestion thing kind of pissed me off at first, I didn't like it. I got an addon to make it look like the Firefox 2 drop-down bar, and now I like it. It's much quicker now as well. I believe the addon is called "oldbar."

Also, if you use Firefox you need to get NoScript (disables all scripts - you can toggle on and off and change what it allows easily), Yet Another Remove it Permanently (allows you to permanently remove anything on a web page - no more annoying text ads!), Redirect Remover (removes redirects when you click on links), and of course Adblock + FilterG.

[scottws]

I stopped using Adblock Plus + Filterset.G Updater when I saw a comparison between the Easylist subscription (built into Adblock Plus) and Filterset.G.  They both were excellent at blocking ads, but they said Easylist performed slightly better.

Plus there was the issue where the server hosting the Filterset.G updates was down for something like six months.

Now I just use Adblock Plus with the built-in Easylist subscription.

[Cobra951]

I never knew about Filterset.G.  I've been using Easylist as long as I've known about it.

I'm a late adopter anymore.  I hate change for its own sake.  Are there any real & significant improvements in FF 3?  Speed and memory footprint are 2 areas of significance that immediately come to mind.

[WindAndConfusion]

Firefox 3 has four five useful improvements over Firefox 2:

• less memory usage
• faster rendering and more asynchronous IO
• better standards compliance (not directly useful, but good for the future)
• a built-in download manager that isn't utter crap
• improved stability

[Xessive]

So far so good. I'm likin' v3.

I've noticed a slight version between the XP and Vista version: the default is blue in Vista (which I like) and more colourful in XP (with the emerald < and > buttons).

[TheOtherBelmont]

I'm liking it so far and I am noticing an increase in the overall speed of the program.  The only weird thing I've noticed is that it doesn't seem to displaying some non English characters correctly, (I noticed this on the Wikipedia front page), they show up as little boxes with a two digit number/two letter combination within that box.  It's not really that big of a deal, but still kind of odd.  Not sure if its a bug with the character encoding or some new setting I need to adjust.

[Xessive]

I'm liking it so far and I am noticing an increase in the overall speed of the program.  The only weird thing I've noticed is that it doesn't seem to displaying some non English characters correctly, (I noticed this on the Wikipedia front page), they show up as little boxes with a two digit number/two letter combination within that box.  It's not really that big of a deal, but still kind of odd.  Not sure if its a bug with the character encoding or some new setting I need to adjust.

Yeah, that seems to be the big issue now. I'm noticing it with Arabic characters.

[scottws]

Well, I updated my Vista PC, my work PC (XP), and my laptop (Linux w/ KDE) to Firefox 3.  Better performance my ass.  My work PC was already straining before, with it's massive 256 MB of RAM, now it thrashes even more.  Firefox will basically lock up for a minute at a time in some cases.

It's fine on the other PCs though.  I noticed the suggestions are much better formatted now.  I noticed it on my Vista box last night.  I thought maybe that it was just Vista vs. KDE, but I just updated the laptop too and it's much much nicer now.

I see there's a new tagging feature in the bookmarks, but I'm not really sure exactly what it does.

[idolminds]

On its own the tags dont help all that much. You can go and sort by tags and stuff but thats a little cumbersome. I got a nice addon called TagSifter. Opens your tags in the sidebar and lets you select them and narrow your bookmarks down really fast to find what you want. I really like it.

[scottws]

Some updates...  Maybe I spoke to soon about Fx3 on my work PC.  The performance has been fantastic the last few days.

Also, I went through all my bookmarks and added tags, then got the TagSifter add-on that idol suggested.  It is pretty nice, but I don't have THAT many bookmarks that it would be all that useful right now.  Still, it's a good extension.