Firefox 3 Beta 2 released

[Improved in Beta 2!] Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

Some of the highlights from the new release:

New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and displays where a file came from.

Integration with Linux: Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.

Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you're looking for.

Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 2 includes over 30 more memory leak fixes, and 11 improvements to our memory footprint.

The new location bar is probably for me the biggest change to the browser. I can't say that I like it because the fonts just seem to big to me. Maybe its just because I'm not used to it. They also hide the go button when your not typing into the address bar, instead the star overlaps it when not in use.

Here is the download link
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Release notes
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b2/releasenotes/

They also talk about the new themes being made for each operating system in this post
http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/12/13/a-first-look-at-firefox-3s-icons/

 

thanks for the head up!

just wanted to expand a small print that in ur link above:

"Firefox 3 Beta 2 is a developer preview release of Mozilla's next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.

These beta releases are targeted to Web developers and our testing community to gain feedback before advancing to the next stage in the release process. The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users. Users of the latest released version of Firefox should not expect their add-ons to work properly with this beta.

Much of the work leading up to this beta has been around developing the infrastructure to support a bunch of exciting new features. With this second beta, you'll get a taste of what's coming in Firefox 3, but there's still more to come, and much of what you'll see is still a bit rough around the edges."

cheers ...

 

and known issues (expanded from Crankierboar in post#1 link):

Known Issues

This list covers some of the known problems with Firefox 3 Beta 2. Please read this before reporting any new bugs.

All Systems

* Privacy > History > Remember visited pages to "0" has no effect (bug 366075)
* MathML does not render properly in Firefox 3 Beta 2 (bug 324857)
* Yahoo! Mail will not work; users must use Yahoo! Classic Mail (bug 398381)
* Windows Live Mail will not work; users must use Hotmail Classic Mail (bug 396259)
* Cannot drag and drop folders in the Places Organizer, for now users must use cut and paste (bug 405198)
* The new Location Bar, Add Bookmark dialog and Download Manager Information popup behave inconsistently with Window-Eyes and JAWS 9.0. Using JAWS 8.0 is recommended for this beta. (bug 407359 and bug 393398)
* The malware protection blacklist is not currently activated
* Using the Internet Download Manager add-on will cause Firefox to crash; it should be disabled or uninstalled (bug 382356)
* Using the ChatZilla add-on will cause Firefox to crash; it should be disabled or uninstalled (bug 407034)
* Cannot create new profiles with the Profile Manager in Turkish localized builds, use command line arguments instead (bug 408199)
* Web feeds served as text/html won't load properly (bug 381357)

Microsoft Windows

* Crash reports cannot be sent from machines running Windows Vista (bug 390568)
* Non-administrator Vista users are unable to launch Firefox if Vista Parental controls are enabled (bug 396509)
* A Windows Media Player (WMP) plugin is not provided with Windows Vista. As a workaround, in order to view Windows Media content, you can follow these instructions. Note that after installing you may have to get a security update and apply it before you can see the content in the browser.

Mac OS X

* Placing the cursor in the location bar or text fields sometimes doesn't work (bug 354768)

Linux and Unix

* Restarting Firefox from the crash reporter doesn't work on Fedora 8 (bug 407229)
* Some GTK themes fail to properly render the disabled state of checkboxes and radiobuttons (see bug 388131)
* Some icons are missing on 64-bit Ubuntu installations (bug 402742)

cheers ...

 

the only thing im worried about is they are going to bloat it up with version 3. i really hope they dont and keep it lean and fast..

 

i can only confirm that it is lean and fast, with current Minefield ongoing testing (reading the last 10-20 posts at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168731 )

cheers ...

 

Great news! Just woke up The new beta is my breakfast

Thx for news!

EDIT: err... what! I'm confused! Is this newer than 3.0b3pre ? On the link you gave me, the ver. number is 3.0b2

 

OP Crankierboar was correct with the new and the version.

I recommend that u just ignore it since u have been actively playing with Minefield anyway. The daily builds would overlap the official beta version.

cheers ...

 

Ahh ok, I get it Thanks !

So the only difference is that, this is an official beta release?

 

yep! with no unwanted headaches and surprises than with Minefield

cheers ...

 

i saw the other thread and you mentioned it was using near 60-80mb of ram with three tabs open? with 2.0.0.11 i only see about 40-45mb with three tabs open? i even opened 6 tabs and only see maybe 80 or so unless they have streeming video or a lot of flash then the usage goes way up?? so is this new build that much more inefficient than 2.0.0.11?? it seems that way

 

well, im at 6 tabs and its @ 47mbs

there all forum tabs tho, it all depends what your looking at

 

Yeah, Flash/video seems to consume much more RAM

 

Any site using AJAX, like digg, lifehacker, gmail, etc.. will consume enormous amounts of RAM. It's not Firefox's fault that these people don't know how to make a web site.

 

looking like that Mozilla had taken note from ur observations:
. from Minefield build 2007121905
. fonts and row are scaled to be in proportion of the page, nicer and smaller

cheers ...

 

"Part of Firefox’s memory overhead is by design. Whenever you visit a page in Firefox, the browser caches it for some time. If you frequently go back and forth between pages this cuts down on load time, but the trade off is increased memory usage.

There are ways to limit the amount of caching through the config panel, but now there’s also RAMback, a Firefox extension from Stuart Parmenter that makes clearing out your Firefox caches a snap.

RAMback simply adds a menu item to the tools menu that allows you to quickly dump your caches. If you assign a keyboard shortcut to it, you’ve got a quick, simple way to dump caches whenever you need to."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5972

it must be noted that this is not the same as "clear cache" inside clear private data. From the developer's explanation:
"the extension clears a bunch of internal caches that aren't cleared by clearing the disk cache in the "privacy" tab. The extension isn't meant to really solve memory problems, but give users better control over extra things that might be hanging around.

We're working hard on the memory fragmentation problems which should give much bigger wins than needing to click a button all the time"

this addon supports FF3 and current Minefield builds

cheers ...

 

well i tried opera both 9.25 and 9.5 and i am back to firefox. blechhh to opera. im using 2.0.0.11 and am wondering if i should try the beta or wait a bit longer..

 

I downloaded it

1st impression: Same speed as IE7 and I like more the large bookmark page in IE7

 

in your opinion is that faster or slower than ff2 was?? trying to get a feel for how it really runs. i hate install / uninstall all the time i like a nice clean machine..

 

u can install FF3beta2 and FF2 tpgether without one bombing the other out. It will be installed under different folders, but FF3beta2 will be sharing the same bookmarks/setup that u have in FF2. u just cannot run them in parallel

cheers ...

 

You can also create a new limited user account and install the beta there. Just install into the user's documents and settings folder. The program can't write into the programs folder or the windows folder, or the local machine portion of the registry. You can keep the account for those purposes or just delete the account and its documents and settings folder when you're done.

Keeps your system clean.

 

If you don't have a lot of RAM then Opera is the way to go.
1GB or more will suffice through FF & a few other apps.

 

Or install the portable version from portableapps.com. That one should leave no traces behind on the system. You can run it at the same time as your FF2 if you:
Copy the file "Other\Source\FirefoxPortable.ini" into the same directory as "FirefoxPortable.exe"
Edit that file and change "AllowMultipleInstances=" to "true"

 

Dunno, I only used the FF during the IE6 era, that's a long time ago.