So I just downloaded and am trying Firefox 3 Beta 4. So far it seems fast and smooth; I like the new default theme a lot. Has anyone else tried it?

I'm using Beta 3 - its really nice. New theme is awesome. Finally does Acid 2...

On a related note, I've also tried IE 8 Beta 1 - it can *almost* do the acid 2 test! Seems like MS is *finally* making IE standards compliant, w00t

Oh, and Acid 3 is out - and its pretty much kicking every browsers' ass right now... Although IE 5.5 fares better in the Acid 3 test than IE 6 and 7, which is pretty pathetic...

http://www.anomalousanomaly.com/2008/03/06/acid-3/

Yeah, I really like Fx3 Beta 4. The new default theme is very nice and it scores a 67/100 on the Acid3 test. On the other hand, IE8 Beta 1 scores a 17/100. So as of right now, I do not really see Microsoft doing anything good, though I hope I am surprised.

The only thing I've noticed is that Cemetech forum pages don't go full-width for some reason. I'm guessing that's because of some standards compatibility problem with Cemetech, not with Firefox.

Yeah, this site is riddled with errors.... Kerm is teh suck at the HTML

For CemetechLite, yeah. 6 Beta is pwnfully valid XHTML.

Well then fricken finish Cemetech 6 so we don't have to deal with your html fail.

The clever way to phrase that would be "htmfail". In all seriousness, I have negative free time until May and possibly beyond, so we'll see.

I'm just waiting for the final release to test it out so I don't get any bad impressions due to beta-bugs when I compare it to Opera.

Final release would be great, but the beta is pretty solid (aside from a host of extensions that don't work with it )

I get that impression as well from my now-3 days of use. The only brief problems I had were DivX videos lagging it out for about 30 seconds, but it seemed to resume stability afterwards.

so, I finally tried out RC1, because the newest AJAX feature additions to facebook were getting to be unusably slow on my old laptop, and everyone's been making a big deal over FF3's improved scripting speed. The speed improvement was dramatic, but I really can't stand the interface. it feels so pathetically unfinished and inelegant compared to Opera....and garishly shaded, but it seems like I'll be stuck with it until I get a new laptop, or if Opera 9.5 has some speed improvements.

The memory usage seems to be pretty good so far, but I haven't tried any crazy multitasking yet.

I, on the other hand, have had no problem whatsoever with speed and memory usage, am very happy with the clean, uncluttered interface, yet have huge stability problems. Fx2 almost never crashed on me, but it's a rare day when Fx3RC1 doesn't crash at least two or three times.

Yeah FF3b5 has crashed on me many times, though mostly at start up once its running I rarely have issues.

RC1 hasn't crashed at all yet, although I'm making no guesses as to when it will..


the interface still seems really distracting to me, and very incomplete compared to Opera.

blech.

Yeah, I suspect that part of the problem may be my computer; I'm planning on cleaning off my comp and wiping it tomorrow.

ok. so. counts of FFs interface fail.


garish shading.
lack of sidebar and Download manager being a window instead of a tab.
lack of integrated BitTorrent, and mail.
lack of Wand
lack of Speed-Dial
lack of convenient address bar features/drop down toolbar,
lack of user defined search engines

>>Lack of user-defined search engines

Uhhhhh no? You can totally add custom engines...

with opera, you right click in the text field you want as search engine and select "New search engine"

no stupid messing around.

1. doesn't really matter
2. Both available as add-ons
3. again there's and add-on for it. and personally I don't want my mail integrated.
4. never used it so IDK
5. Add-on
6. not specific enough to respond to.
7. They are there, I know, I've used it though the setup for it may be better in opera.