Firefox 3 Beta

Yay I'm back with another of my far too infrequent posts, but I'm getting more of a writer in me so perhaps that will change. Anyway, I decided to download the Firefox 3 beta after they mentioned it on TWiT, so here are my first impression for the mac side of things:

I have always loved using Firefox, it is my browser of choice by far on Windows machines and it probably still has dominance over Safari on my mac, which is what I am on right now (using Firefox 3 to type this, or course). The third iteration of this great browser certainly lives up to its name. It's fast as ever and looks and functions better than ever.

Leo and the guys mentioned that one of the main new features of Firefox 3 is that it looks like it should for a given OS (vista and Mac OS X). Firefox 2 looked sort of like an XP program with an Apple header, it didn't look much like a Mac program, but they weren't kidding; FF 3 indeed looks like a Mac program and really just looks much better than the previous version. The menu and taskbar area is very smooth and everything just seems to flow better.

On the performance and functionality side of things there are a few differences, if not quite as noticeable. Supposedly it's faster, I haven't really checked, it may be just a tad but it's not insanely noticeable. One thing I do like is it seems to have even less annoying pop-ups asking me if it wants me to remember a password or something. It just displays these questions in a bar at the top like it does when it's missing a plugin or such in 2. This is probably my favorite new feature to be completely honest.

Anyway you look at it, FF 3 is certainly a great continuation of the amazing Firefox legacy. It;s not quite as big of a jump as 1-2 was as far as I can tell, but it's still an improvement and hey, it's only Beta 1, give it time. I say it's definitely worth a download but just be aware that many extensions and themes you might have may not work in it. Other than that, it's great. Long live Firefox!