Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Firefox 3 Beta is here!

I downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 1 from here this morning. This post is a summary of what I saw

1. Firefox 3 is certainly faster. Installation goes fast. The startup time is less that Firefox 2 (but still more than IE). The page loading appears to be fast, even faster than IE.

2. It is available in more than 20 languages. Of Indian languages only the Gujrathi version is available. This is surprising as one would expect Hindi or Tamil version to be out.

3. Installation works well. Only thing that I realized after installing was that many of the add-in were not supported. But then it was too late. I am going to miss Selenium, Xpather and host of other add-ins.

4. At the time of closing Firefox asks if user wants to open the same web pages the next time it starts. This is pretty clever. Good to see a feature which was hidden deep into product settings being made available.

5. Firefox handles the passwords (say proxy) bit differently. Initial "login ID/PW" popup does not have the usual "Save password for this site" check box. I think that is asks that question when one moves away from the web site. This would be a nice thing to have, although it would take some time to get used to it.

Overall, it looks to be an interesting product to use.