Firefox 3

[Pangloss]

Anybody else checkin' this puppy out? I'm pretty impressed with it so far.

 

One of the things I really liked that I haven't seen much discussion about was a really cool installer feature that imported not only the bookmarks from IE but also the browser history, cookies, passwords, and so forth. Very handy.

 

Seems like they've really raised the bar.

[ecoli]

I've been using the beta version that comes with Hardy Heron. I, too am impressed.

 

I think they found a bug in it already, that potential attackers could exploit. Though, I'm sure a patch will get released fairly soon.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

And details aren't publicly available, so you should be fairly safe.

[ydoaPs]

It still won't load PDFs for me; I have to download them and view them outside of FireFox.

[Pangloss]

I heard something about PDFs being messed, but I imagine they'll fix that soon as well. Always bugs with new releases.

 

The only thing kinda bugging me at the moment that seems unlikely to be fixed is the formatting of the screen in Outlook Web Access. It's not too surprising, I'm guessing MS probably put some highly customized scripting in their specifically aimed at IE. But it's a bit annoying because I have to use OWA for work.

 

I might grab that plugin that lets you open IE windows as tabs inside the FF app frame and see if that works. Kinda reminds me of the old "view in IE" plugin they used to have, where you could right click on a link and select "View in IE" and it would open the page in IE instead of FF.

 

But I'm guessing stuff like that is a lot more rare than it was 3-4 years ago.

[ecoli]

there's a decent pdf viewer plug-in out there that I use.

 

My gf really liked it because, on her browser (FF 2.something) whenever you try to click on a pdf link, an infinite number of tabs try to open. You have to hit "stop" and then close them all manually. This extension took care of the problem, however.

[arnoldschwartz]

I have it definatly impressed with it, its a great web browser and very fast too

[jason1234]

Firefox 3 is awesome! I love the ability to search websites visited in the address bar on-the-fly. Very stable too.

[arnoldschwartz]

has anyone else found that firefox3 crashes more than the previos version, thats what i have found

[Pangloss]

I haven't had a problem with that in general, but it did lock up on me once while trying to execute some javascript on a pretty busy (script-heavy) site after I interrupted it a few times. I've had the same thing happen with that page in IE6, though, and I thought FF3 recovered from that situation a lot better -- it actually asked me if I wanted to try and resume the session, and when it did it perfectly recovered the other tabbed sessions it was running at the time, which was a neat trick.

 

(It even retained the text that I had typed into the quick reply window in a thread here at SFN, but had not yet submitted. Isn't that slick?)

 

Alas, I am constantly having to switch back to IE6 for compatibility purposes, mainly with my school's internally-built web portal. I'm tracking down some of the specific compatibility issues for the design team, which is 100% ASP.NET-based, so I can advise them on what I think will just be a few changes.

 

Unfortunately I think the Outlook Web Access client is a lost cause. Perhaps that's deliberate on Microsoft's part -- every non-IE browser gets a stripped-down, simplified version of the client, which works ok but is very tedious to use.

 

There are some plug-ins I can add to FF to handle that, though, and at some point I plan to install them, so I'm not complaining. In fact as an ASP developer I consider it my onus to dig into it a little deeper and communicate to my ASP students how to avoid those issues, so the occasional incompatibility is actually a bit of a plus.

[DJBruce]

I really like the new FireFox but I still use Internet Explorer for most of my browsing I guess I am just use to it.

[Pangloss]

BTW, here's a cool tip: If you are a GMail user, you can actually subscribe to your own email account's RSS stream and slap it into the quick bar just below the address bar. Useful for checking your email without having to actually visit GMail.