Firefox 3.0 (Minefield): Pretty Slick

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Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will
have to ram it down their throats. - Howard Aiken

You can download the Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 nightly builds here. Frankly, I"m pretty impressed with this so far. It seems to load faster than the previous version, and it certainly does pass the Acid 2 test with flying colors (as does Internet Explorer 8.0, which is still in closed BETA).

I predict that Firefox 3.0 will enable the Firefox browser to capture an even greater percentage of the overall browser market. I intend to install it on my Open SUSE Linux VM with MONO on it that I use for experimentation.

It's not about religion here - it's about a browser that performs well, doesn't blow up in your face on a site that serves FLV video or Silverlight, and generally doesn't cause you problems.

The Windows Installer for this is only about 6.72MB, installs in about 20 seconds, automatically imports all Internet Explorer settings and bookmarks, and provides performance that I see is comparable to or superior to IE 7.0...

And, of course, standards compliant too, hmm?

To be completely honest, I'm really getting tired of IE quitting on me because of this page or that and have wasted a considerable amount of time trying to "fix" its many little idiosyncrasies.

I like Microsoft, it has been developer-friendly and very good to me over the years. But, I am also a pragmatist. You give me a good tool, and I'll use it. My 2 cents.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous2:03 AM

    I couldn't agree more! I've never felt the need of using a different browser than IE, it load fast it handles (nearly) all pages I usually visit - until reasonly. Suddenly a certain site's pages has stopped working, crashing IE all the time, in which has forced me to use a different browser (FireFox). Ironically, the site which is starting to crash IE and force me to use FireFox, is pages at msdn.com!!!

    ReplyDelete

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