First Impressions: Minefield 3.0b4pre

I learned the day before yesterday that Firefox 3’s third beta will be coming out. Ecstatically, I ran to Mozilla’s beta download page, only to found that it hasn’t been updated yet. With a ‘what the hell’ attitude, I took a detour to the trunk builds (my personally preferred place to download) and took in Minefield.

Right now Minefield is at 3.0b4pre, at least on February 11th it was. Right now I can only see AdBlock working – every other has been disabled. This is has also surprised me as to how less I’ve been using extensions lately. Though yeah, I miss Smart Bookmarks Bar, Boox, UnPlug, and of course, StumbleUpon.

Since Beta 2, Minefield has been faster and more memory efficient. I can sense that it started up a little faster, but it wasn’t instantaneous either. It’s definitely more memory efficient and feels less bloated in itself. The menus and interface are snappy and everything works smoother and slicker. I wonder if the performance will go down once my extensions come in.

The new address bar is pretty cool.Now when you type into it, it searches into the metadata of web pages, not just their URLs. This ends up being insanely handy. The Bookmarks bar is now the new home of the Home button and a new “Smart Bookmarks” folder records your most-visited websites.

I haven’t checked out the overhauled bookmarks manager yet, since I’m not much of a bookmarker (I prefer StumbleUpon to record my favourites, personally).  I do see the Bookmarks bar as being somewhat more space-efficient now as it looks trimmed. Even with large icons on, I seem to be able to see a lot more of the page than before!

The new icons are in, and the Back/Forward buttons look gorgeous. The other buttons look like they still need some work. I haven’t tested it on Linux, so I don’t know what icons are available on that end. I’m also seeing many other changes that make this browser even more smoother and sleeker. I’m loving this.

Charamel!

I’ve always maintained that the best theme for Firefox ever was Charamel. However, it never became compatible with version 2, and hence I had to regretfully drop it. I tried it again twice, but the incompatibility jarred me. I came back to try again, and what do you know – it’s now compatible with Firefox 2 (about time, seeing as Firefox 3 isn’t far from release).

Download and excellent design over here.

Firefox 3 Beta 1

The first beta for the third Firefox has been posted at Mozilla’s FTP, right after all the nightlies and trunks. Since Betas are more or less complete, as compared to Alphas, I decided to give this one a spin. I’m typing off it right now.

This has been released only a couple days ago, so none of my extensions are compatible with them – not one.  Of course, this gives me plenty of room to check out what’s new and different.

The first thing I noticed was that the speed thing was for real. Firefox does start and load pages faster, now that it uses a new engine. Browsing is especially smoother and I see absolutely no slowdowns on Digg or Gmail anymore. The usual two-digg-windows-freeze has also been killed, so I’m thankful for that. WordPress also runs flawlessly, so that’s a relief.

The Bookmarks Bar has been slimmed and now includes a neat “Places” feature that lets you quickly access recently visited, “starred”, and tagged pages. Tags are the new addition to the revamped Bookmarks system, and are certainly a welcome addition. There’s also a system of screenshots, but I don’t like it, personally. I still haven’t understood what the hell is up with the Star system. Mozilla doesn’t have an offline guide explaining Stars and what they do, but I guess things will be cleared up in the Wiki or in future releases.

Right now, things are looking okay, though I’d like to learn what the Stars do and I’d really, really like all my extensions back, thank you. Also, it’ll be nice to have a visual refresh – I know that Mozilla will update the icons and stuff, but it’s time Firefox got some colour and slickness. A good browser needs to look good, too.