Firefox 3 Beta 1 has now been officially released. You can download the beta here, in a lot of different languages. You can still view some screenshots below if you would like.
A new article has just sprung up on Digg, giving a few links to an early release of Firefox 3 Beta. It’s really actually a release candidate, so that Digg article isn’t completely valid. But anyway, I’ll give a rundown of the new Firefox, and the main new features I can see after 2 or 3 minutes of playing with it…
- Faster rendering engine.
- Different-looking URL suggestion box
- Zoom, hah, it’s fun.
- Ability to select/remove CSS style from a page.
- Ability to customize default application to open after files are downloaded based on filetype
- A very thorough “Page Info” window
- Prettier Downloads window
- “Do you want Firefox to remember this password?” prompt now appears like the popup-blocked alerts, you know, at the top, so it’s less obtrusive.
- URL suggestion box uses some kind of regular expression to figure out where you’re trying to go. For example, if you know only one part of the URL, Firefox will show you the other URLs that contain that string.
- You can now “tag” sites and add them to your bookmarks with a small star icon before the green arrow to visit a URL.
- “Restart Firefox” button in Add-ons window is always there, no matter what.
That’s all I can see from a first look… I’m betting that much more will be added later.
The theme looks pretty much the same, although the spot where the favicon is now has a little background, and when clicked, it no longer selects the entire URL, it tells you about the ‘identity’ of the site you’re currently on.
As far as I can see, the release candidate is fairly stable. Mozilla has asked to wait if you can until the official beta release, because this is indeed a release candidate, no matter if it is stable enough. On Ubuntu 7.10, after uninstalling Firefox, I still had my list of bookmarks preserved (thankfully, because I didn’t remember them until after the uninstall!)
So, if you’re courageous enough to try this release candidate out, I will give you the direct links.
If you want to download the RC in another language, you can view the whole release directory and find your language here.
And here come the juicy screenshots (more being added ASAP):
- About window
- Page Info window
- General Tab
- Media Tab
- Feeds Tab
- Permissions Tab
- Security Tab
- General Tab
- Downloads window
- Page Style feature
- Normal
- None
- Normal
- Zoom
- In
- Out
- In
- Bookmarking/Tagging
- The pains of a release candidate: no support.. Hm. I should upgrade to Firefox.
So, as said earlier, when the updates come, I will update this post!
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Well this all sounds very good, now once this comes out i can get rid of internet explorer again. I like the page info functionality but will websites have to include this within there websites?
No, it includes information about the codes. Hah, for this page, it even tells me that the template is “K2″ because of a META tag. There’s a few tabs (General, Media, Feeds, Permissions, Security). On the Media tab, it shows every single image that was loaded, and what and where it was used for. In the Feeds tab, it displays all the feeds given by that page.
So, in short, all the information it displays was really already there. But much of it would be hard to find otherwise.
I’ll probably take a few screenshots of that for you to see.
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