FireFox 3.0a1 "Minefield"

[kelley]

Over at Ars I read about this initial release of FireFox 3.0a1 called Minefield. Everyone was saying how fast it was and I decided, lets see how fast. Holy crap is it fast! Yes its still fairly buggy, but god damn is it fast. Be aware that if you install it it over writes your current FireFox settings.

 

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/?C=M;O=D

[Jon W H]

Any screenshots?

[ChrisBardon]

There's a 3.0 alpha already? Isn't 2.0 still in beta right now?

 

I haven't installed any of the beta firefox builds, but I've been sorely tempted lately. 1.5 and up have really improved the memory problems, but they're still pretty prevalent. I know that a lot of the memory leaks in Firefox are due to the extensions that I have installed, and I've been sorely tempted on more than one occasion to download the source and try rolling my own version of the browser. Then reality sets in, and I realize that that'd take way more effort than it's worth

 

From what I've heard though, 2.0 is a major improvement on the memory front, and that a lot of extension functionality has been moved into the core browser.

[Ryan FB]

There's a 3.0 alpha already? Isn't 2.0 still in beta right now?

They took certain features out of 2.0 and branched it so it could be stabilized and released. Meanwhile development still continues on the trunk, which is what will become 3.0.

[Jon W H]

From what I've heard though, 2.0 is a major improvement on the memory front

 

That would be nice. My Firefox (1.5.0.6) has run into a weird problem. If I use Yahoo.com related sites or a certain page, the browser might hang in loading the page (progress bar in the tab remains stuck at halfway.) I end up having to close Firefox out and kill the Firefox process in the Task Manager window. Kind of annoying, but I've learned to work around it in the meantime.