Old news?

Story: Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 3 ReleasedTotal Replies: 8
Author Content
herzeleid

Feb 25, 2008
9:22 AM EDT
I've been running beta3 for a couple of weeks - In fact I just read that beta 4 is on the verge of release.
hkwint

Feb 25, 2008
12:40 PM EDT
So if this is old news, what about trying to 'create some news' just over here. Like: Do you recommend 'progressive' people willing to try out new things' to update from FF2 to FF3 yet for day to day use, or is it too unstable for day to day use at this moment?

Hmm, I should really have Klik2 installed to test FF3 without throwing away the existing FF2 I believe.
Abe

Feb 25, 2008
1:20 PM EDT
Quoting:.... or is it too unstable for day to day use at this moment?
I heard that FF 2.x and 3.x can coexist.

herzeleid

Feb 25, 2008
1:41 PM EDT
They can coexist, it's common to have the vendor supplied package in its default location, and the mozilla tarball unpacked somewhere under /usr/local.

After testing FF3 beta for a little while I just decided to dive in and not look back, I have only FF3 on my desktop. It's snappier, and while some addons don't work yet, at least adblock plus works fine with FF3, and the rest I can live without for a few weeks or whatever.
hkwint

Feb 25, 2008
2:00 PM EDT
OK, thanks; that's what I like to hear. If Adblock works I should be ready to go too, and hopefully spellcheck and flashblock do work too.
gus3

Feb 25, 2008
10:04 PM EDT
Does NoScript work w/ FF3? I won't browse without it.
techiem2

Feb 26, 2008
9:05 AM EDT
Yes, noscript works. And Adblock Plus works too.

(I may have had to manually hack one of them to say it supported FF3 though)

As for coexisting, I just downloaded the package and extracted it and run FF3 from there.
TxtEdMacs

Feb 26, 2008
11:51 AM EDT
"I heard that FF 2.x and 3.x can coexist."

Yes, but ... Do not run both with the same profile. Firefox 2 bookmarks were a bit fragile and later in the alpha 3 series a major change was made moving the bookmarks to the sqllite database. It is unwise to go back and forth between Firefox 2 and 3 beta.

I have found several problems with beta 3 as I have reported on the Firefox Build Forum. Initially it self destructed on startup and more recently showed another flaw even with a new simple profile. In both cases beta 2 functioned perfectly. There is one important caveat, I am running on an old Linux distribution: Ubuntu 6.06.

On a positive note, many of the memory leaks and other flaws seemed to have been removed by beta 2. Its performance (beta 2) far exceeds anything I have seen in any of the prior versions. One warning, the Windows version gets more attention, with more users, testing and fixes. Indeed, I had a Linux release candidate (or might have been the real release) crash on startup for version 2 just as the current beta 3 did. Nonetheless, my experience has been that these problems are fixed and I fully expect Ff 3 to be the best release. If I had the time to do some testing, I might now be using beta 2 as my default browser. However, I will stay with version 2.0.0.x until I am certain I will not lose my 200+ tabs I keep for reference.
Abe

Feb 27, 2008
6:16 AM EDT
Quoting:Yes, but ... Do not run both with the same profile.
TxtEdMacs,

Thanks for the helpful info. I haven't tested FF 3.0 yet but planning to.

I normally have a special computer for testing new release for cases where damages could occur. I usually make backups of profile and dot files in general, just to make sure I don't lose a lot and to be able to recover quickly without major headaches.

The warning is well taken as a reminder.

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