Firefox 3 Beta 1
Posted on 10th November 2007 in Browsers |
1st beta of Firefox 3 for Mac is out. Compared to earlier releases it has improved a lot in terms of bug fixes, looks and speed.
For a start Beta 1 doesn’t crash. In addition to this ‘insignificant’ improvement there are few more:
Acid2
Good news for developers – Firefox now passes Acid2. Click here to take the test.
Rendering performance
A lot of speed in this release. Gran Paradisos didn’t even come close and it actually seems faster than WebKit.
Smart cards
Version 2 of Firefox broke a lot of sites that employed smart card readers. Thankfully this is not the case in this build. Everything seems to work properly.
Looks
Like for the alphas, controls have got this Aqua feel now that all the macheads are used to. Toolbars don’t exactly look like expected (see Firefox 3 going Macish) but you can spot the slight changes:
Lastly, no significant CSS developments. No Web Fonts. And there are still some rendering bugs, e.g. text-decoration.
Click here to download Firefox 3 Beta 1.
4 Responses
Thanks for the update. Do you have any idea what theestimated date for Firefox 4 is? I am looking forward to JavaScript 2 and can only hope that CSS3 starts to be supported.
Well, Firefox 3 has CSS3 transparency support
No clue about Firefox 4 other than Gecko 1.9 roadmap draft that has JavaScript 2 listed.
Hopefully they have improved their poor implementation of border-radius. Also do you know anything about disabling font smoothing? I’m sure I read about that somewhere.
As Firefox 3 is emerging only a short while after Firefox 2, hopefully 4 should be as quick for realse, but I would imagine it will take a bit longer due to the large changes with JS and hopefully CSS3.
you’d have to be a complete idiot if you think css3 is going to come anytime soon.