Firefox 3.0b5



I just upgraded to Firefox 3.0b5 Beta. The upgrade was more accidental than anything, as it happened during my upgrade to Linux Ubuntu 8.04. Once Ubuntu restarted, I opened Firefox to find that I had upgraded to 3.0b5 Beta, which was at first quite a let down because a lot of my plugins are not compatible. For example, FireFTP, Sage RSS, and SEOpen are all useless at the moment.

That being said, it didn’t take more than two minutes to be completely in love with the latest build of Firefox. In fact, this is the first new version of Firefox that has impressed me to the point of wanting to post about it in several years.

For one, it’s fast. I mean REAL fast! Sure, Firefox has always been fairly quick, but this latest version feels like they doubled the horse power under the hood. It uses a LOT less memory than previous versions, and it seems to be far more stable from what I can tell.

Firefox 3.0b5 also brings in a new breed of URL bar. The new URL bar is quite intelligent in that it does a great job of predicting where you want to go. I find that 90% of the time it will tell me what I’m looking for after typing only two characters… and it’s dead on. The URL bar also looks through your bookmarks, meaning even if you clear your history you can still pull up sites you’ve saved.

The new version also makes web surfing a lot more sexy to the eye. It cleans up a lot of buttons on the web, and makes a lot of on page graphics cleaner and more visually appealing. My Gmail account has taken on a whole new look since the upgrade.

If there were a five star rating system for Firefox, version 3.0b5 would get four and a half stars from my neck of the woods. A big pat on the back is in order for the developer community at Mozilla. Very nice work!