Firefox 3 RC1 - A Sleeker Fox
On Mozilla.com, interested users can now download the first release-candidate of the upcoming 3.0 version of the popular browser. The fiery fox is available as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X version - I´ve tried the latter to see if it offers any improvements.
Once you open the downloaded disk image, Firefox is installed by dragging the icon in your applications folder. If you have Firefox 2.0 installed, the RC1 asks if it should overwrite the old version. If you´re not sure if you want to keep the new fox, simply rename the existing version so you can easily fall back.
At the first start, Firefox will warn you that certain addons (if you have any installed) are not compatible with 3.0 and offers to search for new a version. Once the main window opens up, you`ll immediately notice the new-look header. Mozilla claims that Firefox 3 finally looks like a real Mac OS X application. While that is somewhat true, I personally don’t like the new look too much as it looks kind of cluttered.
The address bar brings us two new features. If you click the RSS icon, you`re not just redirected to the RSS feed like in 2.0, the new version lets you choose between all available feeds including Atom and other RSS versions. Besides the RSS logo, the new bookmarking button can be found
Hit it and the star turns blue, indicating that the site has been bookmarked. By clicking on it once more, you can organise the bookmark and tag it. Bookmark tagging is one of the new version’s interesting features. Especially if you have a rather large collection of bookmarks, tags can help you organise them and find stuff quicker.
For example, you can tag all sites that offer certain features like a forum, a blog or whatever and find them even if they don’t belong in the same content category. The bookmark menu displays your bookmarks the classical view or you can choose to see them organised by tags.
Other features of the new version include a zoom feature, hitting Apple -> + or - will zoom in an out of pages. Version 3 also offers an improved download manager and the addon-manager now offers direct downloading of new addons and themes. Also, Firefox 3 now supports Growl notifications.
On a more serious note, Firefox 3 offers a few important technical changes. The fox now warns if you open a page which contains mallware or any other harmfull content. While this is not a very big issue with Mac OS X, it’s certainly good to have.
Maybe the most important feature is the improved memory management. Firefox users know the problem, if you used the browser for some hours, it will most likely eat up hundreds of MB ram because the browser is not able to free up used memory. The new version fixes this issue, I did not manage to make the browser eat up more than 200 MB of memory. This improvement alone is worth downloading the 3.0 version. Stability of the RC1 version was fine and very well usable in your daily routine.
