Finally, it’s out. I hope everyone downloaded it during the Download Day, if not, do so now. At least give it a try, especially if you’re still suffering with Internet Explorer (that thing makes both the user and the developer suffer). The Download Day was, i think, a success, since FF3 was downloaded more than eight million times in that 24 hours. To write something about the browser too: it’s about the same as before, i couldn’t see many changes, except for that the skin i used (Noia) and some of the plugins do not yet work with the new version (at least the webdev toolbar had no problems). The base skin of FF3 is not bad at all, by the way, it’s simple and compact, but not ugly. If there’s an increase in rendering speed, i’m happy about it, although while browsing as usual there was no significant change. On the other hand, the settings panel and the bookmarks changed a lot, and there is a couple of other minor changes too, about which later.
The settings panel got a new tab called applications, where the user can handle all the external programs called to run music or other media files or PDF documents. Finally there’s a way to make FF start up with the tabs open at the time of closing, which is a great feat, and that’s what i missed (though got used to it later).
One thing in which i can’t see a bit of improvement is the printing, which is just as slow as it was, and on my second attempt, it even managed to crash. But at least it remembers the contents of the input fields even in crashing, which was missed a lot in previous versions—i’d be quite angry now too, if i’d have to type this post again from sketch (and note that this paragraph was (almost) the last i wrote).
The bookmarks improved a lot. For a long time i’ve only been using the bookmark toolbar, and left my bookmark folder in absolute mess. That showed when i needed to open that menu, because it took about half a minute to load. In FF3 it takes half a second. The toolbar folder is finally not just a folder in the menu, but it’s separated, just like the new recent bookmarks, recent tags and most visited folders. Some of these three appear on the toolbar too, though by now i don’t know which, because it was my first to remove it. I think it automatically imports the bookmarks from the past FF version (or IE, if you were brave enough to use that thing). This gave me a bit of trouble, because i had an older beta installed too, and it imported from that, instead of the FF2 i was actually using. Didn’t take much tweaking to solve. And there’s a star in the address line which adds the current page to the bookmarks. Quicker than drag and drop for sure, though i don’t think i’ll ever use it.
The website icon’s place changed a bit too, clicking on that brings forth an information panel with all the authentication, headers, information and generally all you may ever want to know. At least, that was my first impression… The url bar’s new intelligent feature may be a bit strange at first, but when you don’t know exactly what you want to type, but you know a part of it, it can get instantly very useful.
Nothing else for now… I like it, and you won’t see any negative changes compared to the second Fox (except if you’re very dependent of a yet unavailable plugin), so i guess it worth installing. And if it’s installed, you won’t really use any other browser… (Except for debugging your website designs)
