First Firefox 3 Beta ready for download

Al sez, "This is a Mozilla DevNews article announcing the release of the first beta of Firefox 3. You can download it from this link (which Mozilla asks that people go to in order to read the information included in it)."

I'm downloading it now. First beta == interesting curiosity, but nothing I plan on using on a regular basis. Still, I saw a demo of the Firefox 3 beta a couple weeks ago at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, and it was amazing -- particularly the zoom-whole-page feature that lets you resize all the elements on a page, up or down, including images and form elements. No more squinting at tiny webcomic writing! No more tedious side-scrolling for huge-mongoose inline images! Link (Thanks, Al!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

Zan

So the biggest feature is something that Opera has had for at least 5 years?
CitrusFreak12

Bloody hell, I just uploaded to Firefox 2.0 not more than a week ago!
Advice_Network

Is the new FF going to be less of a memory hog? Mine got up to 77% of CPU while it was opening this window.
merlia

Thanks for your link, i will surely give-up a try for my mac by downloading this beta version, which will helpful i guess…
TheFirstMan

AdBlock is supported. So is NoScript. I’m running FF3b1 now. Everything’s running noticeably faster. I haven’t tried to blow the memory fragmentation issue up yet, but I find that this installation is a pleasure to use so far. Pages render much faster.

Of course, the page zoom isn’t the biggest feature here. It’s primarily the back-end stuff that’s getting an overhaul. Gecko 1.9 (which incorporates Cairo) and bookmarks can be tagged due to the new SQL bookmark backend (this is nice). Something like 300 memory complaints and bugs have been fixed.

The new backend will allow a better feeling of OS-integration, supposedly. FF on OSX will use cocoa widgets, toning down the ugly on a mac.

And how long did FF take at %77? Mine usually jumps up to %80-odd upon launching for…oh…about half a second. I’d hate it if one’s goal in life was to leave processing power unused. But then again, I run Folding@home.
TheFirstMan

Also: FF3 will never run on OSX 10.3. It requires OSX 10.4 at the minimum.
devoinregress

Nice and slick. Slightly better page rendering. It will take a bit more to get me away from WebKit/Safari
TheFirstMan

By the way…is there something up with the log in dealy? I’m having trouble logging in on my non-cookied session as well.
Ryan Waddell

As long as FFox 3 doesn’t end up using 400mb of memory after leaving it open for a few days, I’ll be happy.
oliver dyas

The Image Zoom extension lets you scale images with Ctrl-, or . or / , or a context menu.

Ctrl– or + zoom text and forms.
noen

“I’ll third the AdBlock Plus recommendation. Awesome add-on.”

Why not just edit your hosts file?
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

It has the advantage that if you do get infected it blocks malware from dialing out.
Cory Doctorow

AR, is that a genuine comment, or just a way to put your URL on our message boards?
Anonymous

…particularly the zoom-whole-page feature that lets you resize all the elements on a page, up or down, including images and form elements.

Hasn’t Opera had that feature for years?
js7a

I love it, but I probably won’t upgrade until some reasonable subset of what I consider to be these essential extensions are supported:

Adblock Plus
CustomizeGoogle
gTranslate
IE Tab

For what it’s worth, I usually also install:

CookieCuller
Fasterfox
User Agent Switcher
Andrew Denny

The ‘zoom whole page’ feature is already part of Internet Explorer 7. In fact several elements of IE7 surpass Safari and Firefox 2, including support for higher screen dpi.

I’ve got a WUXGA laptop (1900×1200, HD resolution, 150dpi) and only IE7 works properly on it.
musicman

what, no filterset.g for your adblocking goodness?
Anonymous

@ #3

It’s also been part of Opera for a loooong time. I think there’s also some extensions for Firefox that try to do the same thing.

Still, good to see it finally getting into Firefox proper. Now if they added all the other nice things from Opera…
Anonymous
Opera has whole page zoom (conveniently placed on âŒ˜+Numpad+ and âŒ˜+Numpad-) for ages.

BTW, I tried logging in to send the comment, but I keep getting this error:
```
Can't call method "datasource" on an undefined value at /var/www/boing-cgi/mt/plugins/CustomFields/lib/CustomFields/Template/ContextHandlers.pm line 91.
```
agentorange

did someone say fast? On my mac is it even slower and MORE sluggish scrolling the bb frontpage than even FF2…which is a dog compared to safari.

It is incomprehensible that a browser can suck up so much memory AND be so sluggish at the same time.

I will pass, thank you very much.
Anonymous

mongoose?
Anonymous

I hate to start this discussion, but..

I think Opera added the zoom whole page feature in their version 7.

That is, five years ago.

</your favorite browser sucks>

By the way, the login page is down at the moment
Jonn

@Andrew Denny
I agree the page zoom is nothing to get excited about since IE7 came out. However I still prefer to use FF if at all possible because imo it surpasses IE7 on a lot more counts than IE7 surpasses it.
Brian Damage

@musicman
filterset.g is woefully outdated. AdBlock Plus is the way to go these days. Just subscribe or one or two lists and you’re all set.
Giovanni

Screen zoom is kind of cool I guess, OS X has supported full screen zoom for your entire desktop for years now.

IE7 users 1 upped! :p
Burz

The way FF3′s address bar was described to me, it seemed like they were creating a bigger problem than they were trying to solve. Computer novices should not be subjected to URL-mangling browsers that supposedly insulate them from ‘nasty details’. The original intent was to emphasize the domain name, but became perverted into something different that censors bits of the URL, chopping it up into nonsense.
Laurie Mann

I downloaded it and didn’t see any real differences.

However, the text in this comment box is now illegible. Hmm…
dculberson

I’ll third the AdBlock Plus recommendation. Awesome add-on.
Burz

OK, you can’t run it on OSX 10.3 so I won’t be looking at this thing today.