Just a quick update on the impending release date of Firefox 3 beta 3 and a surprising turn around time for beta 4 as well:
The targeted release date for Firefox 3 Beta 3 is now February 11 and follow on Beta 4 is “tentatively” scheduled for February 26, according to Firefox meeting release notes posted on Mozilla.org Tuesday.
And for those of you wondering about why a beta 4 release is necessary at all especially in the light of hitting the streets so soon after beta 3, it’s simply for putting a final polish on the "OS specific" visual refreshes that Firefox 3 will incorporate when used on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
The Firefox development team has decided to put out a Beta 4 version to refine the Windows, Linux and Mac OSX themes and overall “Visual Polish,” offline support, security UI and Places feature, according to the meeting notes. Beta 4 is referred to as the “final ship”
So it looks like I wasn’t that far off in my guesstimate that beta 3 was right around the corner seeing as how the 11th is Monday and not far away at all. For those of you that decide to take this on, the upgrade to beta 4 in and around the 26th should be easy if not mostly automatic through the "Check for updates" located in the "Help" menu. The caveat here is where a large portion of extensions are already compatible with Beta 3, not so many are compatible with beta 4 (yet). Most of them are probably just a matter of changing the "Max version" number in "install.rdf" that’s part of an extension’s compressed ".xpi" file but unless you wish to take this on yourself, it’s still up to the extension author to do this so there might a bit more waiting time for your favorite extensions to become available but I can’t believe it will be that long.
Still, all in all, beta 3 and beta 4 should turn out to be a solid, stable browser if my experience with the trunk builds are any indication at all and I’ve been using these builds exclusively as my browser of choice for quite awhile now. "Places" or "Library" as the old "Organize Bookmarks" is now called still has that ridiculous dragging and dropping of items between folders problem (in that you can’t) but there’s time yet to get that fixed.
The more I see the more I’m looking forward to the final release.
Tags: Firefox 3
Comments 2
Did they ever take care of the memory leakage issues? I’ve always been one to leave things open on my laptop for days at a time (though the laptop may be in sleep mode). The fact that things would start to get really slow after a while has always bothered me. Of course, I haven’t updated in a while, either.
Posted 06 Feb 2008 at 4:19 pm ¶Hi Stefanie and welcome,
By my experience with the trunk builds and reading the developer’s info the memory leakage problems have been vastly improved. I’ve had Firefox 3 (nightly’s) open all day along with up to 7 tabs open and memory usage hasn’t gone above 68 megs. That’s including having the default 50 meg cache set (in Firefox’s options) and 4 extensions loaded.
One thing you have to remember is that badly coded extensions are the main cause of memory leaks not that Firefox 2 didn’t have any of it’s own. Although the Firefox team has taken care of over 300 possible memory leaks, having a lot of extensions installed will eventually add up in memory usage.
More than you needed to know?
Posted 06 Feb 2008 at 5:47 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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