A tester’s look at Firefox 3 Beta 3

[Added additional info on the new Doenload Manager. - Peng]

As Nanci posted last night, Firefox 3 Beta 3 came out yesterday and while some of us are happy with it while others, like me, aren’t so sure about it. There will be at least a fourth beta before Firefox 3 reaches Release Candidate status, but I wanted to give you guys (and girls) a look at how things are shaping up in Firefox 3 so far.

Remember, this version of Firefox 3 is for testing purposes only and is not for use by most people. There are certain things that people need to look out for in terms of bugs that aren’t quite fixed yet, some of which can cause you to lose data like passwords, bookmarks, etc. I’ll give you links for  getting your hands on the latest beta but you use it at your own risk. I’ll also point out some things that you need to do before firing up Firefox 3 Beta 3 for the first time.

Also, I’m running nightly builds of  the Firefox 3 betas under Linux and since they have gone for a native look in the default skin some things may look different in OSX and Windows from the screenshots I’m providing. In addition, I have customized my Firefox pretty heavily so things may be in different places than you may be used to seeing them. If a difference is because of a new feature in Firefox 3 I’ll let you know.

As I pointed out in an update post on 30 January,  the Home icon was taken off the Navigation toolbar where it’s always been and moved to the Bookmarks Toolbar. I still don’t get this logic, especially since so many people have posted to the Mozillazine forums (the main help resource for Mozilla products like Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey) asking where the hell the button went to and how can they get it back. In case you missed it, just open both the Navigation Toolbar and Bookmarks Toolbar, then right click either toolbar and select Customize…, and you’ll be able to drag your Home icon to wherever you like it best. You may find that a misbehaving extension is keeping you from changing your toolbars. If this happens to you, disable your extensions, make your changes, and reenable the extensions one at a time until you find out which extension is causing the problems. Chances are the offending extension isn’t quite compatible with Firefox 3 Beta 3 and you either used the Nightly Tester Tools to force compatibility or you disabled compatibility checking completely. Make a note of which extensions are causing you problems and keep an eye out for updates to them. You may also want to contact the developer to let them know that you need them to update the extension for Firefox 3 because it obviously doesn’t simply need to get the version number bumped. Keep in mind that they probably know it needs to be updated already and may just be waiting for Firefox 3 to reach Release Candidate so they don’t have to update it multiple times as Firefox 3 keeps changing, like the developer of the Gmail Notifier extension has had to do (and we love that he’s kept this extension working as Firefox 3 changes).

As I stated before, they’ve merged the  Back and Forward, and tab history buttons into a single unit they’re calling the Keyhole. I won’t give you a screenshot of it because the Linux version of Firefox 3 doesn’t really show you how it looks in any other operating system. I will say that the new combined history dropdown (including pages you’ve seen going either forward or back, with the current page bolded) works better than I expected it to. We’re just going to have to change our behavior to the new history dropdown or not use it at all. But the Keyhole isn’t all bad news. The devs do know it’s still kind of fugly on some OSes and they’re working on it. Remember, this is a beta release of Firefox 3 and things can still change between now and when it’s released.

The new Awesome Bar

The Awesome Bar is getting a lot of mixed reviews. It’s a replacement for the Location dropdown and many people think it’s aptly named. In a nutshell it lets you type in either the name of a bookmarks you’ve set, the beginning of a URI or the name of a page you have visited in the past (as long as it’s within the number of days you set for how long to hold on to your history, with the default being 90 days). I’ll admit that I do kind of like it, although the page title is pretty big (something that can be taken care of in the theme rather than in the basic coding of Firefox 3). Once caveat: If you want to go back to the old behavior you’ll need an extension to do it, and I don’t think the extension has been created yet.

There are two other changes to the Location box. The Go arrow has moved to inside the box, and it only shows up when you type in the box, so if you are used to using the Go button to reload a page that doesn’t want to load properly (such as to bypass the dialog box about resubmitting form data) you will have to go to the Location box and at least type a space (and get rid of it) before hitting the button. The second change is an update of the feed icon, and i think this time they finally got it right. There were some rather well deserved complaints about the icon they use for Firefox 2 but I think just about everyone will like the new icon for Firefox 3.

What’s that star beside the new feed icon?

I’m so glad you asked. That’s part of the new bookmarking mechanism that got added with Places. If you’re one of the millions of people who use bookmarks (I’m hearing that we may be fewer than I always thought, but that’s another story) now you can bookmark a page by pressing Ctrl-D, by selecting Selections > Bookmark This Page… or by using the star in the Location box. But the star isn’t a one-click bookmark tool like you may think.

• Click the star once and the page goes into the new Unfiled Bookmarks folder  (which needs to go onto the Bookmarks dropdown menu, and they are aware of this)
• Click the star again and you get a dialog which lets you edit the name of the bookmark and put it in a specific folder, as well as add tags to the bookmark which can be used for searching in the new Awesome Bar
• You can change your mind and delete the new bookmark by clicking on the Remove Bookmark button (although I believe not the Cancel button or by hitting the Esc key)

They’re still working on this new bookmark system, so anything you see now may not be the same when Firefox 3 comes out. I’ll try to let you know what they end up doing when I write about the official release of Firefox 3.

Personally this new dialog has confused me enough that I almost never use it. I also don’t bother with tagging my bookmarks because I have my bookmarks organized into folders and in some cases multiple layers of  subfolders, but I always have been kind of anal retentive when it comes to organizing things.

The current state of Zooming in Firefox 3 Beta 3

I hate to say there’s nothing new in this beta regarding zoom, but in the latest nightly build I’m using (actually the Firefox 3 Beta4 pre nighly build from 13 February) they’ve finally added the new menu options for zooming. I’ll have to disable my Zoomer extension to see how the new builds of Firefox do with Zooming, but as of right now I consider Zooomer to be a must have extension for anyone who wants to zoom the text on a page rather than the entire page. Of course the developer may decide to pull Zoomer before Firefox 3 is released because it’s no longer needed, but as I’ve already told him I love the zoom icons that Zoomer provided (which you can see in my Navigation Toolbar, under the Help menu and between my Console² icon and my Search box)  and I hope he at least gives us something with that functionality when Firefox 3 comes out.

I also have to say that I don’t like the new way the Ctrl-Mousewheel changes the zoom factor. I often use Compiz Fusion’s Zoom  feature to use the Super (Windows key) and mousewheel to zoom into a page to see something better, but if I accidentally try to zoom out with the Ctrl key rather than the Super key I end up zooming way the hell out on the text in my browser, making it absolutely tiny. So far the Ctrl-0 key won’t reset the zoom for that like it does if you use the Ctrl-=/- keys, but it’s had a bug filed on it and hopefully it will be fixed soon.

The Add-ons  window gets a new tab

The Add-ons window has gotten a new tab for searching for extensions on addons.mozilla.org (AMO), but it’s not working properly yet. When Firefox 3 comes out you’ll be able to search for new extensions from Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons and install them without having to open a tab to AMO. This is a really cool feature and I can’t wait for it to work properly.

Download Manager issues

I have to admit I don’t know if it’s a Linux issue, an issue with my specific setup  or  if it’s an intentional thing, but the Downloads Manager has gotten flat out Spartan, to say the very least. You can still clear the window by right clicking on any item and select Clear List or remove a single item by selecting Remove Item form the context menu. I actually posted the screenshot so I have it available to post a question at Mozillazine, but I’ll post a comment with the information I get. As it stands right now I don’t like this dialog looks, but as soon as the Download Statusbar extension gets updated for Fx3 I’ll finally be able to get away from having to use this rather fugly dialog.

Updated 13 feb 9:28 PM ET: It seems the spartan Download Manager is intentional. There’s an image showing what they expect the final dialog to look like, although there is talk of adding a Clear List button somewhere. Thanks to Canyonero over at the Moziilazine Forums for the information. [/Update]

Closing Firefox 3 has gotten slower than it was for Firefox 2

There’s a known issue with Firefox 3 Beta 3 that has Firefox closing slower. It looks like it closes as fast as it used to, but you can’t start it up again (or any version of Firefox) as quickly as you used to be able to do. It seems there’s an issue with writing your bookmarks to a file that can go really slowly if you have a lot of bookmarks. What I recommend is having your System Manager, Task Manager, or whatever it’s called in your OS so you can visibly see when Firefox 3 Beta 3 actually closes. There is a bug filed for it and we’re hoping it’s resolved before the first Release candidate, if not the next beta, is released.

Do you want to try out the new beta?

I know some of you will want to try the new beta and know exactly (or at least pretty much) what’s at stake with using beta software. If you are thinking of downloading this latest beta I’ll remind you of what the developers say on their official announcement

Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 3 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.

We can’t stress this enough. People are still experiencing data loss with this latest beta so please, please, please don’t download Firefox 3 Beta 3 unless you’re prepared to take all necessary steps to protect your data. If you use Firefox 3 Beta 3 and lose data that didn’t get backed up don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The first thing you need to do is to read the official announcement to see some of what’s new for this beta, and also read all of the Release Notes so you can see not only more of what’s new but also to see the Known Issues in this beta for the various operating systems. After you read both of those pages find the download link they provide and download the beta for your operating system and language (we’ve been asked not to link directly to the download page). Go ahead and install it, but DO NOT fire it up yet.

Before you start the new beta you need to do a few things. First close Firefox and backup your current profile to make sure if anything goes wrong you won’t lose any data. Before closing Firefox to backup my profile I like to specifically export my bookmarks to a different location where I can get it quickly if I need it. Once it’s all backed up you’ll want to use the Profile Manager to create a new profile, making a note of where that new profile is located. This is crucial for two reasons. Firefox 3 doesn’t use the same profile format that Firefox2 uses so you need different profiles for each version of Firefox or your profile will be completely borked for Firefox 2. Also, even if you’ve been testing Firefox 3 Beta 2 you will want to start with a fresh profile to make sure any problems from a profile for an earlier beta won’t show up in the new one.

Luckily you don’t have to start with a completely fresh profile, losing all of your data.  After you’ve created your new profile with the Profile Manager I like to close Firefox (or Gran Paradiso, as the planning versions of Firefox 3 are being called) and copy some of the information from the old profile into the new one. I don’t bring extensions from an old profile into a new one so I can make sure the new extensions work with the new beta. I recommend opening the page I just linked to in your old Firefox (with the old profile) and opening your file manager to select all the files that need to be copied into the new profile. Once the files are selected close Firefox completely and open another window in your file management program for the location of your new profile. Closing Firefox before copying the files will ensure that no files are locked as being in use when you try to copy them.

Once you’ve copied the information from your old profile into the new one start Firefox 3 Beta 3 using the Profile Manager to use the new profile you just created.  Then have fun with the new beta, seeing where things break or just don’t seem to work properly. Make sure you file a bug for anything you find broken (searching to see if it’s been filed already, of course), posting questions and comments in the Firefox Builds section of Mozillazine so you can work with the rest of the testers and devs to get Firefox 3 ready for general release.

Of course Nanci and I would love to read your comments on Firefox 3, so please post them here as well so everyone can see how you feel about it.