Development on the Firefox 3 browser is finally starting to wrap up. It’s been a year and a half since Firefox 2 was released to the public, and by the end of May Firefox 3 will have entered the Release Candidate stages. This is all preparation for what looks to be a June 2008 launch of the long awaited Firefox 3 browser.
Mozilla has been fortunate enough to have over 1.2 million users test out pre-release versions of Firefox 3. With a test base that large it’s expected that Mozilla will deliver a top-notch browser, and I strongly believe that they are doing just that. I’ve been running nightly builds of Firefox 3 since before it hit the Alpha stage, and the progress I’ve seen is rather remarkable.
There are quite a few notable features in this release, but the thing that really takes the cake are the performance enhancements. As I’ve already shown the memory usage of Firefox 3 is much better than it was with Firefox 2, and even beats out most of the mainstream browsers. It’s nice to see that Mozilla didn’t compromise performance for the sake of adding spiffy new features.
It’s likely that there will be other Release Candidates available before the final version is pushed out the door, which is something Mozilla wanted to make clear:
If no new showstopper issues are found in RC1 it will become Firefox 3 final. If we find any critical issues we will continue to release new Release Candidates until we are ready for final ship.
All of this also means that there won’t be many changes between what you see now and what’s available in the final version. If you hate the new theme(s) or were expecting new features… sorry, at this point everything is pretty much carved in stone. Bug fixes are pretty much the only changes permitted from here on out.
Thanks to Change for the tip!
Slow to jump on to the bandwagon but I have started using Firefox 3 full-time now. The new them is growing on me. Now, as much as I love to see Firefox 3 final next month, I don’t see it happening. Consider this:
Firefox 2:
3 Alphas
2 Betas
3 RC
Firefox 3:
8 Alphas
5 Betas
? RC
I mean it could happen, but I just can’t see it coming out only after 1 RC.
I don’t think we’ll be getting Firefox 3 anywhere before July. I hope they release it ASAP! I’m dying to try out the final release.
Personally, I’d hope they take all the time needed on Firefox 3. I’ve used Firefox since it was called Phoenix back in version 0.38 or something like that, and when the final release of Firefox 2.0 came out, I finally jumped off the bandwagon for Opera instead. The reason was purely performance. I had recorded memory leaks of 1.7 gigs in size on several occasions, on a system that only had 2 gigs of memory. That made it fill up my virtual memory and nearly crashed my computer a couple times.
I’ve been really hoping they would buckle down and solve the memory leak problems for Firefox 3. So when Firefox 3 beta 2 was released I decided to give Firefox another shot. I was extremely pleased when I wasn’t able to get a memory leak above 250 MB under nearly identical situations as in Firefox 2. Overtime this number has continued to decline. In FF 3 beta 5, I can’t get a memory leak above 175 MB. My memory leaks are now minimal in size and don’t have a drastic impact on system or browser performance, which has caused me to start using Firefox as my primary browser again.
First off, I love Firefox, its been my browser for many moons.
But I always laugh when I look back when it was first released, everyone touted it as the ‘lean and mean’ browser vs IE’s bloatware.
Well, that situation quickly reversed itself, and I have had more memory and stability problems with Firefox than IE for a while now.
It will be great to see Firefox getting back in line.
I don’t understand how anyone uses Opera (or Firefox betas) as their regular browser – I can’t live without my add-ons.
It is definitely a tight schedule to get it out, but I think they might be able to pull off a June release even if they need to squeeze in one more RC. I saw in their forum that they are targeting June though.
That sounds like exactly what my experience has been while using pre-release versions of Firefox 3. They have definitely made huge steps forward in terms of performance, and in the end it will win over a lot of people.
I don’t really use any add-ons in my browser because of security and stability concerns. They’ve often caused more problems and grief than they were worth.
I don’t use Opera all that much anymore because of how stable Firefox 3 has become, but for awhile I didn’t have much of a choice other than to use it. When writing articles I’ll sometimes have upwards of 50 tabs open at a time, and I need a browser that can handle that. Before Opera was really the only one that could without giving my computer a heart attack. So that’s what I used.
Personally, having used the browser since 0.7 or so, I can say I don’t recall ever seeing it use more memory than about 250,000k. I never had big memory leak problems.
So with my experiences, the Firefox 3 betas memory improvements don’t seem like much to me. Memory usage is about the same.
You are definitely one of the lucky few. Most of the people I know have the memory leaks when opening large numbers of tabs.
Is it multi-platform on day 1? I.E. Firefox 3 for Mac and Linux users. Sorry have to ask after all the stuff that happens with Video Games.
I’ve been running Firefox 3 since the alpha versions and used almost every nightly build right up to today. Been using it as my mainstream browser everyday and it’s been 100% stable. I personally think the RC1, unless as they say they find any showstopping bugs will be out on schedule – it’s a fantastic web browser, speed and stability improvements everywhere.
Regarding add-ons, I’ve been using ALL the add-ons that I used with FF2, the NightlyTool addons just allows me to force them as compatible and I’ve had zero problems… Adblock, Smoothwheel, NoScript etc….
Yes, Firefox has always been multi-platform. They don’t have to port anything, it’s written to be cross-platform. Hence, XPCOM (cross platform COM) as a basic framework.
Yup, it’s always multi-platform. You can even use nightly builds (or Beta’s) and they are available for each platform. That’s one of the really cool things with Firefox.
It was not always released on mult-platform (Win, Linux, Mac) as the Mac OS releases from Mozilla did not happen until it was Firefox 0.6
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/3.0rc1-candidates/build1/
Huh, that’s interesting. I also thought that it had always been cross platform.