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Written by Ivan Vujic
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Saturday, 30 August 2008 |
 After a lot of anticipation at June 17 this year Firefox 3 was released. Great expectations were on a table because of great need for eliminating the biggest faults of Firefox 2. Firefox 3 is based on new Gecko 1.9 platform that should provide more precise display of pages and therefore to improve surfing quality, which is confirmed at acid 2 and acid 3 tests.
Regarding to its predecessor, Ff3 now passes acid 2 test while it doesn’t pass acid 3 test, but Firefox 3 turned as better from Ff2 in that exact segment. First thing that user will notice are page and image zoom functions that are now very similar to Opera’s. Now, pictures are zoomed by default and this option can be turned off if you prefer the way of zooming in Ff2. Some changes are noticeable in address bar, which should be a little bit more intuitive (that doesn’t mean that it is). We here only speak for ourselves because we really did like the simplicity in this area that existed in Ff2. There are add-ons that emulate Ff2 address bar in Ff3 so if you share our taste on this matter you can install them. The interesting part is that Firefox 3 remembers zooming levels for visited pages, so the next time when you visit certain page zoom level will be the same as it was when you visited that page last time. This possibility definitely makes easier surfing on internet and you’ll rarely reach for zoom option.
When it’s come to installation, Firefox doesn’t offer automatic upgrade to version 3, so you’ll need to download it from Mozilla site and install it manually. If you had some important settings in Firefox 2 it’s our recommendation to uninstall Ff2 and not to delete profile before installation of Ff3, because Ff3 has a different system of holding information and during installation of new version it will do some automatic conversion into new format. Just to mention that old files will still be in old profile folder in case you want to get back on Ff2. On the other hand, if you didn’t have any important information than we recommend you to delete profile after removing installation of Ff2, because some users had reported problems with old profiles and Ff3.
Because Ff3 has a new way of storing data, corruption of data will not occur, like it was the case with previous version. For test purposes we did several intentional resets of system while Firefox was running and we can confirm that history of visited pages and bookmarks weren’t lost either once, which was the case with previous version in similar situations.
When more tabs are opened, memory allocation is noticeably less than it was the case with Ff2, but in few cases, after closing program it still stayed in memory which disabled its start up again until its process is closed from Task Manager. If you open a lot of pages that contain flash animation, Ff3 can drastically increase its CPU usage, which wasn’t the case with older version. This phenomenon cannot be solved with repeated installation/reinstallation of newer version of Adobe Flash player. Bottom line is: Ff3 isn’t that big memory hog anymore but it becomes CPU hog.
Firefox wouldn’t be itself without extensions but in case of new Ff3 older extensions are not always compatible with Ff3 so you could very easily end up without that “very important” extension. Good news is that most of extensions are already upgraded so that they can work under new Firefox and situations mentioned above are actually really rare. The only exception is popular extension Tab Mix Plus that until this moment isn’t officially updated. In the end, we could only say that Firefox 3 didn’t disappoint us but because of certain bugs we cannot say that announced revolution actually happened, maybe only a little step forward in right direction.
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