And the slow crawl toward Firefox 3 goes on with another beta version. Here’s what I noticed:
- When I first started it, it did the requisite check for updates and compatibility to my extensions. Unfortunately, it hung while checking something, forcing me to kill it and start over.
- When it finally started, it started in offline mode. Offline mode? You have to be kidding me. What application has or even needs an offline mode these days? Maybe back in 1998, when most everyone was on dialup, but now? Please.
- The slow and ugly fulltext search from the address bar is still there. Typing addresses should take you to the first URL it finds that matches the beginning, not something in the middle like you were searching Google or something.
- On *chan-type sites it kept asking me if I wanted to store the saved password (from the optional field) without any option to shut it up.
- Clicking on the input field in the file chooser part of a form automatically pops up the file chooser as if you had hit the Browse button. This is absolutely terrible design, since it is conceivable that someone might want to clear the field or at least modify it manually.
- However, the browser seems faster than earlier betas and overall, is faster than Firefox 2.
- Finally, the file chooser in Linux at last has a image preview in it (something I had actually submitted a patch for — I hope I’m responsible for this change!).
So quite a bit of things I’d rather not have or other problems, but a few very good things here. I’m optimistic that the final will be quite good, though I have a feeling they’re going to keep that silly fulltext search from the address bar and the file browser from the typein File field. At least they have came out with an addon for the former.
