Question of the week: is Firefox 3 the best browser to date?

[HEXUS]

Everyone's talking about it, but is Firefox 3 worthy of the hype? We put the question to you, our readers.

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[kasavien]

The link to the forums in the main article links to a poll about antivirus' not to something to do with firefox 3

[Steve]

The link to the forums in the main article links to a poll about antivirus' not to something to do with firefox 3

Fixed that

I've been using FF3 for about 2 months on my slaptop. It crashed a couple of times, then they released an updated beta and it stopped crashing.

I love the sqlite based history - especially how URL auto-complete works now. Memory usage is about 100MB. I'll comment on that further after I've profiled it under heavy use.

That aside, I'm impressed by the refinements I've made. I think somebody moving from IE to it will be impressed. Moving from FF 2 to 3 isn't so much of a 'wow' though.

[mattythebatty]

I tried the beta of Firefox 3 and I thought it was ok but Opera 9.5 seems better in many respects.
FF3 doesn't have mouse gestures ((yet) I think there might be an addon.)
I think Opera is also a little bit more secure but thats probably just because less people use it.

(my 1st post...)

[awm]

I love the sqlite based history - especially how URL auto-complete works now.

Interesting.... I hate it so much I went back to FF2. I guess its since my browsing style relies on the old functionality to navigate to pages I visit frequently (e.g. to get the forums I start by typing 'f').

Does anybody know how to "fix" the "awesome bar" so that it does history FF2 style?

[neonplanet40]

It still has high memory usage which for me is its biggest problem.

[ionicle]

i dunno bout anyone else, but i keep getting encoding error's, and crap allover most webpages, and it tries to download the forum if i click reply, i have to do it about 3 - 5 times for it to work properly....

pfft, back to 1.5 for me

[dangel]

At least it's "100% Organic Software"

Yay!

Seems okay to me - no big 'wow' though and i'm sticking with Opera 9.5 (shocked, you are). Is there any 'big' new feature that i'm missing as an Opera user (that doesn't relate to addons etc)?

[TheAnimus]

i dunno bout anyone else, but i keep getting encoding error's, and crap allover most webpages, and it tries to download the forum if i click reply, i have to do it about 3 - 5 times for it to work properly....

Yup and it seams to still be dog slow to open, leaks badly still (thou its probably the fault of flash) and has crashed on me.

So with my couldn't care less about the plights of the web devs, its back to IE7 with IE7Pro for mouse gestures

[Noxvayl]

I quite like it... looks better than the old FF2 and for me is noticeably faster just like they say. For that I can't complain. The memory usage is put to good use at least speeding my browsing up so I have no problems with that, although having an inherently slow broadband line that drops often might be the reason I notice a difference when others do not.

I don't find any features on IE7 or Opera that interest me so using either of them is not tempting when FF3 looks good, performs well and has everything I need.

[Andeh13]

I really like it, i find it much faster then IE7 & FF2 and the new style of it is very appealing.

So far on vista 64 i havnt had any crashes or problems to report!

(7.7million downloads as of 5.50pm GMT)

[staffsMike]

I don't like the way it guesses Url's

It doesn't scale text very well.. goes ape **** actually.

Hmmm seems as fast/slow as it ever did. Back to 2 for me I think.

[Noxvayl]

I don't like the way it guesses Url's

It doesn't scale text very well.. goes ape **** actually.

Hmmm seems as fast/slow as it ever did. Back to 2 for me I think.

lol I had that scaling text problem for a short while... sorted itself out within minutes and it hasn't done it again(touch wood and all that).

I guess I might of gotten lucky because the problems others speak of I haven't noticed yet or they aren't features I use so the problem wouldn't affect me

[Nub1]

Have to admit I'm not too sure about about the awesomeness of the bar. Altho it is bringing up favourites I haven't visited in years so maybe time to prune my favourites.

I will say it is much quicker than FF2. So much quicker. Since I installed KIS7 I have noticed a general slowdown with FF2. There are loads of threads all over the net about it. But FF3 solves it. ZZZzzzzzzooooooooooooooooooooooommmmm

To quote a heart attack causing food company's logo "I'm lovin' it".

[rsmarsha]

I prefer FF to other browsers, if for no other reason than the scale and usefulness of addons. Any security flaws that are discovered are also patched much quicker than IE. Also from a web dev point of view it makes sense to design for FF due to the helpful addons and it's closer adherence to the w3c guidelines than IE.

FF3 is quicker as far as I can tell, i've been using it since beta 2 and only had the odd crash in the beta's and rc2, nothing since release.

I like the new url bar for finding favourites. One thing I will say is you'll get better results on existing favourites if you go back and organise them, adding keywords and tags. Once thats done you will get more reliable results. You also have to remember to not just click the star button to boomark as it will default to the unfiled folder. After clicking the star click it again to bring up the menu's to allow you to sort the bookmark location (click the small arrow to the right of "folder"), add your tags and change the bookmark name.

As I've said, go back and add tags/keywords to your existing bookmarks (excuse to tidy them up), the url bar is more useful then. I rarely go to my bookmarks list now, I just enter tags or keywords.

[fuddam]

installed it yesterday. Very iffy with video displaying, i.e. not loading. Went back to IE7 as a result.