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A quick look at Firefox 3.0beta5: Part 1
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Just grabbed Firefox 3.0 beta 5 — it’s looking real good so far, so I thought I’d post a few notes about the release. I spend far more time than is healthy at the computer, and Firefox is probably the application I use the most (next to Vim) so expect more commentary on this throughout the week.
Nothing jumps out at me as a huge change from Firefox 2.x, but I see lots of little improvements here and there, and it feels faster, even though I don’t have any hard data to support that.
This may be the release that causes me to break up with del.icio.us for good. Not because I don’t like the site/service, but because I always have to choose between using Firefox development versions or using the del.icio.us extension for Firefox. I strongly prefer using del.icio.us to using Firefox’s own bookmarks, particularly since I use multiple machines and trying to sync bookmarks between browsers is usually a pain.
But, it never seems like the del.icio.us extension supports the development releases. Since I like to hop on the development releases of Firefox with the last round of alphas or the first round of betas, I have to decide between my bookmarks or the browser for several months.
The good news is that I’m able to import the del.icio.us bookmarks with no problem. The bad news is that all of the tagging is lost, so all I have is an uncategorized lump of nearly 700 bookmarks that isn’t terribly useful in that form.
What is useful is that I can create a tag and then a smart folder from the tag and put that in my toolbar. So, I can have a smart folder of all bookmarks tagged with something like “openSUSE” and have them show up in one folder on my bookmark toolbar. This is how I was using del.icio.us, and it’s very convenient.
Back to work, more to come on the beta soon. If you’re using the Firefox 3.0beta builds, feel free to comment on your experience or any new features you find useful. I’d be curious to hear what others are finding.
> … I use multiple machines and trying to sync bookmarks between browsers is usually a pain …
http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/
I didn’t know Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 was out yet, (a.k.a: I had no idea Beta 5 was released
but with Beta 4 my favorite feature I can’t live without the new address bar with the cool auto-complete dropdown bar.
The del.icio.us extension for FF3 should be released any day now. It has to coincide with an update to the website, apparently:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/delicious-firefox-extension/message/2189
This has been the one thing keeping me from upgrading, too. FF2 on OpenSUSE 10.3 has been very crashy for me.
With respect to extensions not supporting the latest versions, many actually do but their packages just say they don’t. You can disable extension compatibility checking by going to about:config and setting extensions.checkCompatibility to false.
This got me adblock, stylish, referer remover, etc. Use at your own risk, of course.
I’ll give that a shot. What’s the worst that could happen?
Yeah, that didn’t actually work. Nice thought, though…
Also look at the Weave extension that we just announced through Mozilla Labs. I use it to keep about 4 instances all in sync with bookmarks and history.
Weave has actually turned out to be a GREAT service (+ they just added support for cookies in the extension’s latest release…hopefully passwords are next) but if I can’t import tags from delicious for my incredible amount of bookmarks, I’m inclined to just wait for the new delicious extension release.
Spoke too soon…the 2.0 alpha of the extension was just released. I had a hard time getting to it on Yahoo!’s site so I just uploaded it: http://www.fansoftech.com/downloads/deliciousBookmarks-2-0-39.xpi
Why not use Foxmarks to sync bookmarks across machines? I’ve used it for ages with no issues at all and doubt I could live without it.
OTOH, I may be the last remaining holdout who’s never used Delicious in the first place….
Hi, How can I install firefox 3 for opensuse 10.3? I cannot find it anywhere….
Did you try our Software Search?
Sorry, I searched for firefox 3.. I guess the 2.9.95 is the one I wanted… A little confusing IMO.
There are still some rendering issues even in B5 that I’ve reported as bugs previously. Most notably in table rendering where nested elements no longer respect cell boundaries like they used to.
However, it does indeed seem much faster and somewhat better at managing memory.
Regards, J.