Anyone tried out Firefox 3 yet?

[Sqthreer!]

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

I must say, I'm VERY happy with the direction this version is going. It's noticeably faster, and quite stable. The new address bar is great, too.

I've got to go to work now, but let's have a Firefox discussion, shall we?!?!

[Bobbias]

I'm really been meaning to, I know they've changed a lot, so it should turn out even better than 2.

[Zakamiro]

I've had minefield up and running for quite a while now.. Works pretty good, I must say. :>

[vladgd]

how much change are they doing to the thing?  it took me long enough to get used to firefox 2.

[Bobbias]

I've had minefield up and running for quite a while now.. Works pretty good, I must say. :>

I used minefield like, a year ago, lol. I think I was using the one with the old rendering system, because the new one was messed up at the time. IIRC they added the spell check to minefield before the main trunk.

[Spectere]

I've been using FF3 since beta 5.

I lurve it.

[Sqthreer!]

how much change are they doing to the thing?  it took me long enough to get used to firefox 2.

There's not a whole lot of change, as in completely moving things around, but what I've noticed, the graphics for navigation have changed and look kinda kewler. There's some sort of tagging feature I haven't looked into. There's a new "smart" bookmark thing that shows your top 10 frequently visited sites. The address bar is more functional, where it shows the page title as well as the URL, and searches based on more specific guidelines than before. Obviously I have studied the change log EXTENSIVELY. Otherwise, it's way faster; pages load faster, clicking to new tabs is faster, and basic navigation is a lot nicer. The other interface graphics are smoother as well.

OH also, you can search for and navigate a very basic form of the add-ons website in the add-ons window, which now also houses a Plug-ins tab. Downloads window has a search feature...

OH AGAIN, the page zooming feature is more sensible now. It zooms the entire page, including images and styles, basically as if you were zooming in on a screenshot, but better quality. The bookmark manager has also been renovated, and appears to be much easier to use.

Basically, it's gotten a few of the same features that Opera has, and more

These are just the things I've noticed during casual browsing, so there's probably a lot more, less obvious shtuff.

[Spectere]

Tagging is nothing short of bloody amazing.

To try it out, tag a bookmark and then type the tag into the address bar.  BING, your bookmark comes up in the dropdown list.  You can also type in the name of the bookmark in the box and it'll come up.  It really comes in handy when you have a bazillion bookmarks.

The new rendering engine is awesome.  The fact that they went with a true page zoom rather than simply increasing the font size, then went ahead and made it a per-site setting rather than a per-tab one (i.e. if you set the zoom for a Wikipedia entry to 150%, ALL Wiki pages display at that zoom level) made FF3b5 (and beyond) a keeper for me.

Oh yeah, the ability to go to a page and edit a bookmark simply by clicking the star on the address bar (when it's a solid yellow, that is) is also very nice.

[Bobbias]

Wow, lots of stuff. I used it back before the new rendering system was really working on my computer, so I missed a lot of that stuff. I'm definitely going to check it out.

[Sqthreer!]

Oh and in addition to the true page zoom being a per-site setting, Firefox will remember what sites you have zoomed, so when you close it, then return to that page, it'll still be zoomed :O

[Spectere]

Oh and in addition to the true page zoom being a per-site setting, Firefox will remember what sites you have zoomed, so when you close it, then return to that page, it'll still be zoomed :O

Indeedy.  'tis a very lovely thing.

[Bobbias]

Aside from being useful on phones and such, is there any other use for zooming?

[Spectere]

Very yes.

I use it to read pages when I sit back and relax.  I sit a pretty good distance from my monitor (more than an arm's length), so it helps considerably.  My monitor is quite large, but really, when you factor in the increased resolution compared to my last monitor (1920x1200 at 25.5" compared to 1280x1024 at 19") the text winds up looking about the same.  It's not so bad when I'm sitting up, but when I recline (yay chair) it gets uncomfortable to focus on it for long periods of time.

I generally have sites with walls of text (game review sites, Wikipedia, blogs, etc) set for higher zoom levels while sites like these (forums, where the text is pretty spread out and where I'm typing as much as I'm reading) stay at the default.  Thankfully, the true page zooming has much less of a tendency to break pages when compared to simple font resizing.  One thing that happened commonly in many of the sites that I'd view like that is that the text would increase in size but the small column that the text was in would stay the same size, giving you huge text in a small space.  Firefox 3 spreads it out, making that thin bar spread out to the size of the window and enlarging all objects and images therein (including things like Flash objects, believe it or not), essentially simulating a lower resolution (with much crisper text, of course).

[Sqthreer!]

One thing I have noticed is that the built-in session restore feature doesn't seem to work... is this a known issue?

[Spectere]

Hmm...I haven't had an issue with that.

In fact, I just did it.  Three tabs -- this page, Wikipedia, and Google -- and it even retained what I typed so far in this post.

So, uh, I dunno.  Creating a new profile might help.  I never had FF2 on this machine (it's that new ) so something with that might be conflicting with the session save.  An addon might be causing a conflict as well, if you have any of those installed.