Comment by reed

January 14, 2008 @ 8:19 pm

If you haven’t already found this, I recommend Jesse’s “Unofficial Firefox trunk changelog” at http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/trunk-for-firefox-3.html. It lists a lot of the major changes in Firefox 3, so it should help you see if you missed anything.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda

January 14, 2008 @ 8:25 pm

I’m betting that by “RSS feed reader” you meant “Feed preview page, where you can glance at the content of a feed before dispatching it to your choice of actual feed reader, but you can’t use it as a feed reader, we didn’t design it for that, it’s no good at that, and we’re not going to try to make it one, kthx,” in which case you might want to change that line now, to avoid any risk of misunderstandings creeping in along the line.

Unless, of course, you’ve got an actual feed reader you’re planning on landing before b3, in which case, go you!

Comment by shaver

January 14, 2008 @ 8:36 pm

We’re not going to support all of ES4 by a long shot, but we do have a preview of some of the features. We should probably make the statement there milder so as not to confuse.

Comment by crf

January 14, 2008 @ 9:43 pm

Acid2 is not really a standard, it is just a test. No normal user ought to care about the acid2 test anyway, and as a test its usefulness is questionable. Hyping it lends it, or future test like it, undeserved cachet. Why not mention XHTML support instead? :-).

You could specifically mention better linux support. Nearly nobody would know what the phrase “platform native” means. I’d try not to use it alone, and only with lots of context.

The bookmark manager is a good feature to mention.

“Choice if you want to load images or not” is a phrase which can charitably be said to be approaching English … Maybe you could rewrite it and conjugate your verbs: “Choose if you want to load images, or not”, or “Choose whether or not images load”, or, more informally: “Choice of whether images load” or “Choice of whether or not images load”.

Comment by dwitte

January 15, 2008 @ 1:32 am

under “security & privacy”, we now block third-party cookies (i.e. cookies “not from the originating site”) by default - something IE, Opera, and Safari don’t do (but have prefs for). see bug 324397 for the gory details.

Comment by Ian M

January 15, 2008 @ 3:45 am

A lot of those features are existing ones, and it’s hard to tell which ones are new or not. I think a ‘New!’ beside the new ones in the release notes would be useful, either that or a more comprehensive list of new features.

Also, while the code for the password manager has been changed, it’s not really a groundbreaking “new feature” as far as the end user is concerned. I think resuming downloads across browser sessions could replace it. Also the antivirus integration is something end users can understand, so even though it’s Windows-only, it could be a well highlighted new feature.

Comment by Cato

January 15, 2008 @ 5:09 am

I don’t know if “Awesomebar” is the right word to use towards the mass audience. It doesn’t really tell them anything - I mean, it’s not very descriptive.

Comment by Christoph Langner

January 15, 2008 @ 8:15 am

I took a look at the performance too. I compared FF2, FF3beta2 with Opera 9.25 and Opera 9.50.

> • Improved memory management
> • Smaller memory footprint

Yes. The memory footprint is a lot better. I opened a couple of pages into tabs. FF2 takes 100MB, FF3 75MB, Opera9.25 90MB and Opera9.50 100MB. Looks like FF3 really cuts down the use of memory.

> • Faster page load

Yep. This is true. The performance went really up. I used the Load Time Analyzer Add-on to compare the time to load a large page with tables. And again FF3 wins. FF2 takes 1002ms to load that page, FF3 just 675ms. That’s a pretty huge improvement.

> • Faster Javascript?

That’s the only point, where FF3 didn’t improve much. There’s a JS Benchmark. SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. FF2 takes about 18.8s, FF3 16.7s. That’s a improvemet. But when you take a look at opera it’s still slow. Opera takes only about 11s to finish the test. So there’s still a lot do to reach the fastest browser.

Btw. you can read my review here: Firefox 3, The Next Generation (Unfortunately it’s in German.

Comment by Mip

January 15, 2008 @ 9:45 am

My results from the SunSpider
Firefox 3 (Build 2008011405)
19147.6ms +/- 6.2%

Opera 9.24
22700.8ms +/- 12.5%

The best run from 2 on each.
So I dunno about the accuracy of that test…

Comment by Christoph Langner

January 15, 2008 @ 12:05 pm

I repeated each test ten times and calculated a average

Comment by Steve England

January 16, 2008 @ 10:56 am

There’s the easier way to configure how firefox maps mimetypes to your preferred app (Tools > Options > Applications).

As for improved performance / memory usage, that might be swings and roundabouts. Some things have gotten faster, others slower. For memory usage, I think Fx3 uses more memory when it starts than Fx2, but browsing over longer periods of time, memory usage should be lower.

There’s the new theme coming soon too! And improved stability; certainly wrt loosing bookmarks (SQLite yay!)

Comment by K. Ralho

January 17, 2008 @ 5:51 am

APNG is definitely not a standard, so it shouldn’t be listed as a supported standard.

Comment by Raoul Mengis

January 17, 2008 @ 8:13 am

hey,

I am interested in the W3C on output to printer….with CSS3
Who can tell me more about that?

Pingback by links for 2008-01-19 « Mandarine

January 18, 2008 @ 9:23 pm

[...] Featuring Firefox 3 List of new features of firefox 3 (tags: list firefox) [...]

Comment by graphicsguru

January 21, 2008 @ 11:29 am

Can you post the mock-ups to get ideas or a visual

Comment by John

January 22, 2008 @ 9:48 am

Thanks all, for the helpful comments.

GraphicsGuru, I don’t have any mockups at this point…will post something later when the design is more fleshed out.

Trackback by windows vista performance tweaks

February 3, 2008 @ 5:00 am

windows vista performance tweaks…

haha gotta love Windows……

Comment by lfirefox

February 5, 2008 @ 1:44 pm

Thanks for your post. We translated the firefox 3 post for the german firefox - blog. thanks.

Trackback by Adderall no doctor.

February 29, 2008 @ 1:41 am

Adderall no doctor….

Adderall no doctor….

Hi. I’m John Slater, Creative Director at Mozilla, and in this blog I’ll be covering Mozilla design, branding and other good stuff. jslater at mozilla dot com