Firefox 3 beta 3 right around the corner?
Posted by Kirk M on 05 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Firefox/Thunderbird
I updated my trunk build of Firefox 3 with the usual nightly update and lo and behold, instead of "Version 3.0b3pre" staring out of the update dialog box, the nightly builds had shifted to "Version3.0b4pre". This should mean that Firefox 3 beta 3 should be hitting the streets in the next day or so if Mozilla follows it’s usual course of releases. Last time beta 2 was released the same day as the nightly builds hit beta 3pre but whose going to quibble over a day or so either way? This isn’t Vista SP1 after all.
And speaking of Vista, sometime soon (if not already) in these beta 4pre nightly builds the new icon set for the visual refresh for Windows Vista should be delivered so all you folks who are testing these nightly builds for Firefox 3 in MS’s latest OS can stop complaining about how awful Firefox looks in Vista or at least have something new to complain about. Personally, I like the new look for XP and to be honest about the whole thing, I cringed when I saw the first icon set for Vista…it made poor Firefox look more like Internet Explorer than anything else. Sometimes integration can go a bit too far.
So what’s the one big thing that you folks can look forward to when Firefox 3 beta 3 becomes available? Besides the new visual refresh for XP that should be included and a whole bushel of performance improvements and enhancements over beta 2, the one thing that I like quite a lot is the new Add-ons Manager complete with an extensions browser and installer built right in. It even sports a Search function that looks for extensions based on what you type in. And the extensions that show up are all supposed to be compatible with your version of Firefox. Just search, find, select and install all from within the Add-ons Manager itself.
Can’t complain about this new feature too much except for the fact that since the nightly builds went to 3.0b4pre my choice of compatible extensions have gone down to just about nill so I couldn’t grab an image of my own install for you. It figures since many of the available extensions are already compatible with beta 3 and I used to be able to search for just about anything and get results a day or so ago. So you folks that install beta 3 when it hits the streets should have plenty to choose from.
Looks like the Firefox team has been hard at work and there’s still some time left before the final release date. Dare I ask what they’ll come up with next?
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