According to Mozilla’s blurb: “Firefox 3 Beta 1 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 27 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 11,000 issues.” That means little to me. All I’m interested in is performance, reliability, look and feel. And from what I’ve seen so far, Firefox 3 Beta 1 succeeds spectacularly in all areas.
Upon loading the new beta release for the first time, one thing that impressed me, aside from its blinding speed, was that Mozilla has not attempted to fiddle with the look and feel of the interface. There are changes to be sure, but if you weren’t looking for them, you could easily believe you were running the previous version.
However, the differences are there, such as the one click “bookmark this page” star icon in the location bar, the download manager in the tools menu, the site identification icon also in the location bar, the ability to save tabs (very handy when you need to quit Firefox), the ability to add tags to bookmarks for later sorting, page zooming and many more new features.
From Mozilla, just to let you know:
“We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 1 milestone release,” outlined Mozilla interface designer Mike Beltzner in a note posted onto Mozilla Corp’s development centre. “It is intended for testing purposes only.”
Also check out another article: Firefox 3 Beta 1 — Packed With New Features And Rock Solid