Over the next few days Mozilla will be making the official announcement that Firefox 3 Beta 2 is available, but you don’t have to wait until then to get your hands on it! We’ve got an easy-to-use downloader below that puts you just one click away from downloading the latest version.
Don’t expect Firefox 3 Beta 2 to contain mounds of new features though, because that is not what the Beta’s are all about. Mozilla’s biggest focus right now is on stability and enhancing the features that have already been implemented. With that being said there are a few new things listed below that you may or may not like.
–Download–
The download page has not been officially posted by Mozilla yet, but we’ve made it easy for you to get your hands on Firefox 3 Beta 2. Just select your language from the drop-down menu, and then click the button corresponding to your operating system:
–Features–
Note: At this time the official release notes page for Firefox 3 Beta 2 has not been fully updated.
Those of you who tried out Firefox 3 Beta 1 won’t notice much of a difference in Beta 2, but there are a few things that I thought was worth mentioning:
- Places is a little more put together – If you open up the Places organizer you’ll see that it contains a few new things since Beta 1. There is now a History section, a “folder” for navigating through your tagged bookmarks, and a new “unfiled” directory for bookmarks that you haven’t taken the time to place into a folder (a.k.a. you just clicked the star button).
- New Address Bar – I won’t go into too much details about this since we’ve already covered it pretty thoroughly, but as seen in the animated screenshot below the Address Bar is much bigger:
- Some small visual differences – There are a few smaller visual differences, such as the bookmark star button appearing inside the address bar and the disappearance of the Go button. And no, there is no Go button located in the Customize area for you to add it back. Sorry for all of you who were fans of the Go button, but I always removed it anyway.
Well, they finally removed the “Go” button. It always bugged me that they buried the option to remove in under “about:config” in Firefox 2, it was illogical that enforcement as no one uses the “Go” button in any browser since years.
Where is this on the FTP? I downloaded the RC1 of Beta2 a few days ago and this doesn’t seem to be any different. Did they just release RC1 as the final Beta2?? b/c I heard that they were releasing the final Beta2 on Friday.
Let us know, thanks!
Yeah, this is supposed to be the RC of the beta2. I’ll wait until Friday to be sure, although I can hardly wait
The requested URL /pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0b2/win32/en-US/Firefox Setup 3.0b2.exe was not found on this server
I went to the FTP and found the link here:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0b2
But I still think it’s supposed to be final release on Friday.
i found it here: [releases.mozilla.org]
just installed….got this, hehe: It’s a trap!!
You’ve downloaded a release candidate of Firefox 3 Beta 2.
This version of Firefox is currently being tested by our Quality Assurance team. If you would like to help, please take part in the Firefox 3 Beta 2 Test Day on Friday, December 14th.
Release candidates are not official releases and not meant for general use. If you’re looking for Firefox 3 Beta 2, we recommend you watch Mozilla Developer News for the official release announcement.
Sorry about the broken downloader guys, it looks like they changed the filename on me which broke all of the links.
As for this being the final release, it is. When you startup the browser it will tell you that it is just a Release Candidate because they haven’t had a chance to update the release notes page (which I mentioned above). It’s indeed the final version, and it was last compiled on December 11th.
I’m not sure if it’s the same as the last Release Candidate, but it should be given that the last Release Candidate is normally the one that is pushed out the door. Just check the about page and look for the build date towards the bottom. It should say something along the lines of 20071211.
Yeah that comes with the RC. The next test day is actually this Friday I think.
[quality.mozilla.org]
That new testday is for the Firefox 3 nightly trunk, and not the Beta. That’s what the title of the article says.
Looks GREAT. Any idea when/if we could possibly see a 64-bit edition? Beyond that, I can’t wait until v3 is released.
Yeah that’s true.
Unfortunately I don’t think the odds are very good that we’ll see a 64-bit version this time around. They already have a lot on their plate, but this guy is working on putting together 64-bit versions:
[mozilla-x86-64.com]
He hasn’t updated to the betas yet of Firefox 3, but judging from his past release cycle I would say that a 64-bit version of Firefox 3 is on the horizon.
Dude! That’s awesome! For some reason I thought that Firefox worked on Vista 64 bit. Or was I dreaming?
Oh no, it does work, it’s just not taking advantage of the 64-bit architecture. Performance is better when using a 64-bit version of Firefox on a 64-bit machine.
For all of you doubters out there maybe this will help your little hearts rest easy: [developer.mozilla.org]
I downloaded it earlier and tried it out the only thing that I really noticed was the new address bar. It seems a little faster than beta 1.
Gotta’ love the Mozilla dev center.
I used Safari on a mac recently, and that’s a great browser! It was my first time really getting into it, and there are so many great features included. Find as type dims background, as animates found text, has private browsing mode, history & bookmarks unified…
and if you don’t wish to install, PortableApps has made a new portable version of the Beta 2:
[portableapps.com]
Sweet!
One of my favorite features in Safari is that it dims the background when your searching for text. There is something about that which keeps my little head from wondering off into 50 directions trying to find the text it’s highlighting.
Well the beta 3 is working well on my Ubuntu installation. The UI melds well into the OS (current theme I am using) and it just works well.
I’m more than willing to wait:) 32 or 64 bit, it is great and I am in love with it. I can’t wait to use 3.0 stable.
I google way to much to happy without it.
WHY would they not allow google ???????????????
Call me a noob, but I have no idea what the whole 32/64 bit OS thing is. All I know is 64 bit is sometimes not supported.
Right now the advantages are a little limited, but the biggest is that you can have more than 4GB of memory. Not something that is that important right now, but in the future you can imagine that technology will progress in that direction.