Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 2 ReleasedWednesday December 19th, 2007Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for testing. The second beta of the next major Firefox version offers around 900 bug fixes over Beta 1, including several feature enhancements and fixes to improve speed, stability, security and memory usage. Perhaps the most striking change is the redesigned Location Bar autocomplete menu, which now highlights which parts of the page title and/or URL match the entered text. The Downloads window has also been improved: amongst other tweaks, it displays the domain of the source site next to each completed download. The Places feature, which organises bookmarks and browser history, has also been enhanced, offering improved searching functionality and a new Smart Bookmarks folder on the Bookmarks Toolbar. Linux users will appreciate the improved theme, which makes Firefox look more like a native GNOME application and makes use of GTK+ icons where available. Further changes to better integrate Firefox with the look and feel of the operating systems it runs on are planned before the final release. Firefox 3 Beta 2 can be downloaded from the Firefox beta page. The Firefox 3 Beta 2 Release Notes have more details, including information about what's new in Firefox 3 and what's been improved in this specific milestone. The Mozilla Developer News weblog's announcement of Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes links of interest to developers. Mike "schrep" Schroepfer, the Mozilla Corporation's vice-president of engineering, has written a weblog post with links to lists of bugs fixed in Firefox 3 Beta 2. Several websites have posted reviews of the new beta. Wired News has a screenshot-laden overview of Firefox 3 Beta 2, while Ars Technica describes Firefox 3 Beta 2 as "another very impressive release". Australian site iTWire notes the user interface changes and praises the navigation improvements in Firefox 3 Beta 2: "Unlike previous attempts at predicting where you want to go," the article says, "this latest beta really does a pretty darned good job of remembering and discerning your surfing habits." Finally, Mozilla Links has a detailed review of Firefox 3 Beta 2, including a lengthy list of changes. download and try it. And what about x86_64 architecture? I wonder how it could happen ! Earlier firefox 3 beta -1 was just wonderful in passing ACID-2 test. On this criterion it fared very well with Opera and Safari, which are known for fantastic page rendering. To my surprise Firefox 3 Beta 2 ( Tested on Windows XP SP-2 ) fails on this test, while beta-1 was not !. A strange horizontal scroll bar appears on the face of cartoon. All geeks please check this http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top Thanks Sharad ( drssk@yahoo.com ) It does pass the ACID2 test just that a page hosted by the W3C that is used in the test was returning a 404 error which caused what you seen. Same in Opera also. Making Firefox look like a native Gnome app would only make it look more out of place in my machine. Firefox should support KDE as much as it supports Gnome. I'm using Opensuse 10.3 with latest Crystal (Everaldo) Iconset/theme in Kde Firefox 3 b2 picks up the theme perfectly and looks the same as Konqueror etc. Not sure how this is done but it is probably something to do with the gtk-qt theme engine which makes gtk apps follow the qt theme/look of KDE The latest Flash plugin doesn't work with Firefox 3 beta on Mac OS X 10.4.11 PPC. When I encounter Flash content the Flash just doesn't display at all - not even a blank space. Flash works great in Safari 3 and Opera 9.x. When I typed in about: plugins, the only plugins listed are Java. There are no Quicktime plugins either. Ignore my previous message. I disabled Flash and most other plugins for testing purposes and forgot where to look to enable it again. It now works fine. I really DO NOT want page titles to show up in big bold letters in the address bar autocomplete. How can I turn that abomination OFF?? goto "about:config". disable "browser.urlbar.richResults". restart firefox. "browser.urlbar.richResults" is going away (gone now in the nightlies, I believe). The person responsible (sspitzer) already has an addon to revert the behavior. <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227> It's "sandboxed" currently, meaning it's a beta, more or less, and you'll need to log in to try it out. -- Mike It may be going away (I can't claim any knowledge of this one way or the other), but it *IS* still in the nightly build that I'm using, which is current as of the time of this post. Personally, I like the new Location drop-down, though. I just want to increase the text size, not zoom in all the page... They finally caught up to how other browsers have managed zooming for a few years by replacing the graphical engine. You can still change font size in Options/Preferences. I'm not currently using the beta as I type, so I can't check for other possible locations. In about:config, setting "mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action" to "3" zooms text only with control+mousewheel -- Mike Yeah, they have unique and the best text-zooming mechanism and replaced it with HORIZONTAL-SCROLLBAR crap just to be like others. Whats next? IE6 layout engine? #15 Firebug broken in beta 2 due to bug, please vote!by adipose Friday December 21st, 2007 11:56 AM https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391177 For those of you who use firebug, especially the javascript console logging option, be aware that the feature will not currently work in Firefox 3. This will reduce the debugging ability of firebug for developers, so I suggest you vote to have this fixed before FF3 comes out (unless you wish to stick with FF2). Here's the bug report for firebug: http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=130&can=1&q=console.log Here, he tracks the issue down to a firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391177 (same link as the top) Please vote for this bug so us developers can make better pages! -Dan How about really really minor changes? Anyone noticed the following in FF3 Beta 2? (I'm not sure if they were already present in FF3 Beta 1, since I didn't try that version out.) - Words/phrases/sentences you perform drag-and-drop on now accompanie the cursor as a ghostly image of themselves. - The dotted border that appears when you click a link now has the same colour as the link, as opposed to black for every link. Anyone noticed any more really really minor changes? :) I have long had these lines in my user chrome file: /* Hide last item "Open in Tabs" in bookmarks menu */ .openintabs-menuseparator, .openintabs-menuitem { display: none !important; } In FF 2.x that prevents bookmark menus from displaying the "Open all in Tabs" entry. FF 3 beta 2 does not honor this, and the bookmark menus show the entry. Element names, classes, and ids are not guaranteed to be the same between major versions of Firefox. Although this is potentially a bug, it could also just as easily be the result of a UI redesign in which case you will have to determine the new name of the element. This can be done with help from the forum, if you need it. Selects text, drag it and drop onto the desktop. Non-ASCII letters changes to something weird, as well as line feeds. I think, you should automaticaly convert text content encoding and line feeds to the system default while "drag'n'dropping". Ubuntu 7.10, Gnome 2.20 #24 I don't care about "look like's" I want a real natby marciovinici Wednesday January 2nd, 2008 2:12 PM Very good, now Firefox will look like a native Linux' browser, but what about make it a real native Linux' browser? or at least make it work like... I really don't care about visual stuff which I can fix installing a simple theme, i want to know if the "painfully slow scrolling" bug is solved... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90198 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494942 http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=98155 I really loved Firefox while i was only a Windows user. But it happened that i felt in love with Linux too and since then, Firefox is a deception for me... Every time i start Firefox and start to browse I consider to give up... So I don't care about how Firefox looks like, I only want it working fine... I want to love Firefox again. So, the question is: Will Firefox 3 bring me back the web? #40 Re: I don't care about "look like's" I want a real natby schapel Wednesday June 4th, 2008 7:22 AM You can read http://kb.mozillazine.org/Scrolling_is_slow for the latest information about the slow scrolling bugs. Whoever agrees that pressing Esc should cancel adding a bookmark after you press Ctrl+d, please chime in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=396513 Whoever wants to be able to see how long their files took to download, please contribute in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411002 . The developers evidently can't imagine a use case when this information might be useful. Having observed the progress of FF 3, I don't think it will be ready much before the end of 2008. Even some basic features are still implemented as temporary hacks. And some module owners are very reluctant to listen to users' feedback. I guess this is a drawback of open source development -- some contributors treat their contributions as working on their home projects -- if they don't need a feature, they don't want to implement it. There will likely be a beta 3 released sometime in January. There will then probably be a release candidate in late February, with another in early March (if necessary). So, I expect Firefox 3 to be out mid March, 2008, at latest. I think that would be a big mistake, judging by what I see in FF. Expected behaviors are broken, and some developers aren't willing to fix them, using "this is by design" sort of excuse. For example, pressing Esc is equivalent to pressing Enter now when it comes to bookmarking a page. Perhaps, they create problems on purpose so that there is something to do for extension developers (I assume some of them benefit from developing extensions in some ways). Moziila is improving, better then what we already have. No competition to IE. solved many problem When I exit FF 3 beta 2, it remains active for about 20-30 seconds, taking up 50% of the CPU usage. How can I make FF shut down properly? This is my first post and I don't even have FF3 Beta of any kind. I want to express an opinion about only one thing - Page Zoom and Text Size. I converted to FF2 after over a decade of using IE after using FF2 for 30 minutes (literally). One of the MASSIVE benefits of FF2 is the ability to zoom the TEXT and not the stupid page zoom like IE. I do NOT want to lose this in FF3. At least 95% of the time, I ONLY want the text to be larger or smaller. I do NOT want the page to zoom. When looking at images or videos THEN I want the page to zoom. These are two separate and distinct needs, with the text size adjustment being MUCH more important (IMO). Easy, flexible and fast text size adjustment is one of the best features of FF2. Please do NOT corrupt this feature in FF3. Suggestion: Leave <Ctrl>+mouse wheel to control text size. Add <Ctrl>+<Alt>+mouse wheel to zoom the page. This maintains continuity with the current (2.0) version and adds great flexibility for a new page zoom feature. Regards, Dan. yup, you are right. But for moz developers is better to have h-scroll + ugly images than good feature :( Even fx3 "update page" have h-scrollbars on 17" screen when i hit ctrl+ twice. I agree that text zoom only is what I use 95% of the time (if not more) -- if Firefox 3 needs a zoom for images and media, it MUST NOT break the text zoom. Most sites (eg:flikr) and plugins (eg:flash) support media zoom on their own, so it may not even need to be a part of Firefox 3. In FF 3ß2, if I set 200% Zoom and navigate to another page, the Zoom percentage returns to the default. In both Opera 9.45 and MSIE 7, when a Zoom percentage is set, it remains in force until explicitly reset. I’d like FF also to behave this way. If there isn't a config setting to specify it, there needs to be one before release. Also, a way of setting specific Zoom percentages (a la Opera 9.45 and MSIE 7) is necessary, other than the {Ctrl}+ mechanism. It would be nice for there to be a toolbar control that has a field in which one can specify the desired Zoom percentage. In my testing, MSIE 7.0’s Zoom is wretchedly slow and jumpy, FF 3ß2’s much better, but Opera 9.45’s beats both hands down: It’s fast, smooth, and reliable, but its rendering at all Zooms is superb. See http://www.bachware.com/Helge-music/Anamorphosis/page%201.htm to test these issues. Helge Skjeveland bachware.com Hmm... I was just told by Firefox that Beta 3 for FF3 was available. Nothing mentioned here, strangely... The normal visit to a website is to go to the front page and then click on the news, updates, games, videos, ... all the new stuff they are featuring on the front page. That means the front page will never be the last on you visited, although it is almost always the first one you want to visit next time. Now the FF3 url bar will ALWAYS give the the sub-pages as results instead of the front page, because they will always be the last ones that you visited. It actually forces you to type the complete url now. It is impossible to make it bring up the front page of a website, unless the front page is the only page you have even visited. The only thing it is good for now, is url history SEARCH, which really should belong in the url history window. For just typing your regular url's and getting them quickly, it is now completely useless. I use to open most web pages by typing in the first 2 or 3 letters of the url, and the right url would be right there on top of the list. For this, the new behavior is completely useless. So unless they offer a choice, I am going back to internet explorer. |