Mozilla advanced another important step in its journey to the final release of Firefox 3. This is going to be the most important upgrade to the most innovative web browser since Mosaic Netscape in 1994.
Today Mozilla proudly announced Firefox 3 Beta 5 (Gran Paradiso) is ready for download. This upgrade is a public preview release intended for developers and user’s feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed.
New features and changes in this milestone that require community feedback include:
- Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
- Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability.
- Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.
In order to avoid a couple of unnecessary headaches, I’ll wait until the polished product hits the streets sometime in June. However, if you can’t wait until June, you can go ahead and download Firefox 3 Beta 5 by clicking here.
There are numerous online reviews of this milestone on the Internet, but so far Mozilla Links has the most comprehensive review I’ve read. I urge you to check it out if you have the curious itch for new things.
Let me know what you think. I have been running it for a week or so under UBUNTU 8.04 that hasn’t been released. I think the problems I have seen are currently in the UBUNTU platform and not in Firefox.
Hi Don:
I usually don’t want to get involved with software in Beta or Release Candidates status due to constant crashes and/or freezes.
I’ve read that FX Beta 5 is very stable, however it’s still a Beta version. I’m going to stay put until June. If I were you, I would wait a couple of months and play it safe.
Regards,
Omar.-