Thread: Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 4

I normally wait for final releases, but I decided to download and install Firefox 3 Beta 4 yesterday. I guess I gave in because of the numerous performance tweaks in Beta 4 and the fact that I had heard Firefox 3 uses native Aqua widgets on Mac OS X. I am really glad I installed it. This beta is much faster than Firefox 2, feels faster than Safari 3, is certainly more stable than Safari 3 with Sogudi installed, and looks awesome out of the box. It won me over within minutes, and it is now my default browser. I can't wait until the main release.

So it crashes less frequently, starts up quickly, and feels less bloated than stupid FF 2 was?

I heard that it uses native widgets, are they doing that for Windows and Ubuntu too? I use it on Ubuntu, if it outperforms Safari then I'll use it on my Mac too.

Originally Posted by Replicon

So it crashes less frequently, starts up quickly, and feels less bloated than stupid FF 2 was?

¡Sí señor! (and there ends my knowledge of español)

Originally Posted by ninja9578

I heard that it uses native widgets, are they doing that for Windows and Ubuntu too?

Not that I know of, but XUL has always looked fine on Windows and X environments.

Originally Posted by ninja9578

I use it on Ubuntu, if it outperforms Safari then I'll use it on my Mac too.

I don't have any concrete benchmarks, but it seems at least as fast if not faster than Safari. Assuming that's true, you might as well switch to Firefox since Safari doesn't really have anything else going for it: Gecko has better compatibility than WebKit, Firefox is much easier to extend, you can customize the appearance with themes if you're into that kind of thing, etc.

They also improved the look on vista. Looks great now

Too bad not many plugins work yet :/

I got it for Vista, and I really like it so far. Hoping for more theme support soon, though. I do like the default theme better than earlier versions of Firefox, though.

Beta 5 has been released