Mozilla released Firefox 3 Beta 1 today and so the public journey to next year’s version 3 release is under way.
A word of caution; this is a Beta release and a first Beta release at that so it’s aimed at developers and product testers. It does replace your existing Firefox install and any extensions that you have installed aren’t guaranteed to work.
I installed it on Windows XP to give it a quick try out and it’s clear that all of the major changes are under the hood. To the casual user, the only visible difference is that they’ve added a “Add to Favourites” button at the end of the address bar.
However, a number of key issues, which are only to be expected at this stage, mean it’s not really usable on a day to day basis yet:
- none of my extensions worked, so no Firebug, no Web Developer tool bar etc
- my recently ajaxified web mail wouldn’t allow me to log on using Firefox 3. The old version of web mail does.
Reverting back to my original Firefox 2.0.0.9 installation on Windows XP was seamless. I simply uninstalled Firefox 3 and my Firefox short cuts reverted back to the version 2 already installed.
If you’re brave, you can download and install Firefox 3 from here. Otherwise the final public release is anticipated in the first quarter of 2008.
Update: Firefox 3 Beta 2 is expected on December 21st.
Filed under: Web Browsers , firefox 3, gecko 1.9, mozilla
