Firefox 3.0 Beta leaks out a few days early
For those that just can’t wait, the first beta version of Firefox 3.0 has leaked out a few days early.
Mozilla is ready to unleash their next version of the controversial Firefox browser. Mac and Linux versions can be found here, and Windows versions here.
A large caveat though: Don’t expect most, if any, of your extensions work.
I downloaded the Windows version and my copy is looking a tad bare to say the least. Yahoo and Google toolbars are broken, no weather down in the corner, no Greasemonkey and so on.
Was it worth it though? The short answer is “yes”. A couple of new features include “Places” which will give you quick access to some of your most frequently visited sites. And if you want to quickly bookmark something to Places, just click the star icon next to the URL bar. One click will do a quick marking, click it twice and you can choose the folder it goes to and edit the information about it.
The download manager got a cosmetic facelift, as did the add-on manager. As I said earlier, it looks like every extension is broken, but the plug-ins all seem to be okay so far.
When exiting Firefox you will also get a new option when asked if you want to close all your tabs: Do you want to save & quit? You can finally save your tabs, saving you oodles of time if, like me, your first four tabs are the same every day.
I would recommend waiting for the official release, but things look promising so far.
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November 8th, 2007
Really, nothing “leaked”. Mozilla always publicly releases nightly development builds of Firefox, although normal users should never use them because of potential stability issues. They recently changed the version indicator to 3.0 Beta in the development builds in preparation for the upcoming release, but that doesn’t mean they have the product finished for the beta release. They may still have things to fix before the beta release.