Minefield 3.1b2pre

With all this talk of Firefox 3.1 coming roung, I decided to give the second beta a whirl and I’m impressed. Like totally impressed. If Google Chrome was first, then Firefox 3.1 outruns it easily. While I haven’t tested loading times or general performance, web pages load extremely fast.

Fastest javascript performance, which was previously held by Chrome will not go to Firefox, with their new javascript rendering engine that makes Javascript fast, efficient and almost makes applications like Gmail feel like they’re offline apps.

As for visible changes, everything pretty much looks the same. The Add Tab button has been moved to the Tab Bar, which will now be always on by default. It’s optional, but there’s no way to but the Add Tab button back to the Navigation Bar, so this is something I’ll have to adjust to, but is no big deal.

Only Adblock was working for me at first, but I did some screwy things with about:config to get all my extensions working, so everything’s all smooth and good now. I’m going to make this my default browser for now, since after a bit of browsing, it looks fairly stable.

What it needs right now is a private browsing mode, which pretty much everyone else is having at the moment.

PicLens is a promising concept

Doing a round of the Firefox Add-Ons yesterday, I found PicLens and while it has very limited functionality, I was thoroughly impressed with what the guys at Cooliris have done. It renders images in beautiful 3D without a hint of a performance drop, and that is what impressed me the most. Searching Google Images is a completely different experience now. Yeah.

I think it’s very promising, but very underused at this stage. Firstly, the UI is excellent: if Cooliris can somehow implement it into Firefox’s default UI – that would be a crazy awesome browsing experience, especially since the fancy looks didn’t take a long time to load or give a performance drop.

And then in PicLens itself, it would be great if we could save the images directly from the PicLens view, though the most important feature would be to code PicLens so as to identify images on any web page and view them – right now, PicLens is limited to some social networking sites, image sharing sites and image searches (the number of sites is supposedly growing).

I think Cooliris is really cool and can be really big if they look into this more. PicLens might just change the way we look at the Internet.

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.

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.