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A Quick Look at Firefox 3 Beta 1

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is out and there are a few nice new features. I took a few minutes and played around with it and here are my findings.

The Install DMG still doesn’t include an alias to the Mac Applications folder. Come on Mozilla, get this one working please.

Once installed, the new Mac theme doesn’t take effect. You actually have to go download it. But once installed, it looks very nice. (Not sure about the Windows one.)

Firefox 3 Mac Theme

Bookmarks are integrated better. Simply star a page and it’s added, click the star again to rename it, add tags, put it in a folder or delete it.

Firefox 3 Bookmarking

More robust bookmarks management that includes import, export and revert options.

Firefox 3 Bookmarks Management

New places feature shows up. This is like smart folders or saved searches.

Firefox 3 Places

Click on a Favicon in the address bar and you’ll get site information that is usually unknown from a few of my tests. I tested apple.com, techcrunch.com and nytimes.com and all ended up unknown.

Firefox 3 Favicon Site Info

There is a new applications area in the preferences to help control how other applications interact with Firefox 3.

Firefox 3 Applications Settings

As promised, full Aqua widgets for Mac users. And they do look really nice.

Firefox 3 Aqua Widgets

When Firefox asks you to save a username and password, a nice browser bar shows up and doesn’t prompt you with a pop-up window

Firefox 3 Password Prompt

New icon to represent Plugins.

Firefox 3 Plugins Icon

Updated download window with search box and info icons.

Firefox 3 Downloads Window

Firefox 3 beta 1 is also slightly lighter than Firefox 2.0.x on the Mac. The application is 45Mb as compared to 47.8. Hopefully Mozilla can continue to make it smaller; much smaller.

I’m sure there are other features that I’ve yet to come across. However, Firefox 3 is on it’s way and it’s looking like a nice upgrade.

Have you taken Firefox 3 for a spin? What have you found?


5 Responses

  1. shadow7853 says:

    The only thing missing in ff 3.0 is your faboulos themes.. you are the best

  2. Thomas says:

    Thanks shadow7853. I’ll work on updating my themes after Firefox 3 gets to a stable point in it’s development process.

  3. onekopaka says:

    The windows theme has no changes at all.

    Important note: the tab bar, address bar, and others’s tags are changed, so updating themes for Fx 3 is not as easy of a task as maybe thought.

    I would love iAqua or right now, Tinseltown.

  4. Abhi says:

    Firefox 3 seems interesting…hopefully there will be some good themes updated when the stable release comes, so I can escape the ugly XP-ized default theme!

  5. shadw7853 says:

    ok.. i wait to out..

    ps your browser check is broken (I’m on FF 3.0pre2)
    pps sorry for my poor english

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