I started running Firefox at Beta3 and its now replaced V2 as my browser of choice.

Lovin the whole screen zoom thing, and definately faster on GApps. full marks from this ludite.

After beta 3 came out I saw no need for my 2.xx install any more, all the little tweaks make it so much better. If fact the only thing that annoyed me about B3 was that drag & drop wasn't implemented in the bookmarks manager but that's been fixed in b4.

HUNDREDS of leaks have been fixed! No wonder I've been short on memory. Guess even Thames Water could teach them a thing or two.

Also recently updated in the latest Ubuntu Hardy alpha, and all my extensions, plugins and addons seem to work now. Its going to cost me, as I can now buy a high res monitor and zoom the pages so I can actually read them without the text overlapping all over the place.

Google Reader doesn't work for me. It loads the left hand pane with the list of my feeds but not the actual feeds themselves. Anyone else got that problem?

I need them, that's why I use FF 2.

Man, I had to laugh at your comment....

After being in the unfortunate position of working for TW for almost 6 months I can confirm they cannot teach their own staff to do a reasonable job.

I've been loving full page zooming for years in Opera!

I installed it and lo and behold, all my addons are incompatible. Not surprising with a beta, obviously but I just had a bit of a Futurama moment when I started browsing with it...

Bender: Behold! The Internet!

Fry: My God, it's full of ads!

I think I'll go back to 2.x until Adblock and Filterset.G Updater are working, ta!

Will this version of Firefox still occasionally display a completely blank page and say "Done" in the status bar? Seems to happen with El Reg comments pages quite often. Anyone else get that? Sometimes when I get bored with hitting reload I copy and paste the URL into IE et voila!

ABP workin fine for me...

Paris, why not..

Thames Water can't be worse than OnStream can they.

At least their engineers are their engineers.

Right?

I hear that they're using the new malloc implementation from FreeBSD.

"Will this version of Firefox still occasionally display a completely blank page and say "Done" in the status bar? Seems to happen with El Reg comments pages quite often. Anyone else get that? Sometimes when I get bored with hitting reload I copy and paste the URL into IE et voila!"

I have never seen that at El Reg or anywhere else I would like to visit (and I never use IE. If a website does not work with Firefox, it is probably created by morons and I'm not interested in it). You probably have connection problems, or a ISP (or a corporate firewall) with a funnily behaving proxy.

"I installed it and lo and behold, all my addons are incompatible."

Same here, sort of - one of the plugins that was working was ABP. Unfortunately, the plugins that I use the most, Web Developer and Firebug, don't work (yet) so it's back to 2.xx for me also.

Even so, v3 looks promising.

Paris, 'cos she doesn't appear to have plugin compatibility issues ...

AdBlock Plus has worked fine since the first beta...

The sub title (leaks plugged) sounded too good to be true.

But with "Memory leak issues — a major thorn in Firefox's paw since 1.0 - continue to be addressed by the Mozilla's open-source team." it probably doesn't mean what i initially understood it as - "*the* memory leak has been fixed" or "*all* memory leaks have been fixed" but sadly probably (only) "*some* memory leaks have been fixed".

Yeah i understand it is probably harder to fix leaks than adding new features. IMO memory issues are *the* thing FF (2.x) could improve on. Oh, well, at least they didn't completely give up on it and instead recommend you buy more ram or restart the app every day :)

"Will this version of Firefox still occasionally display a completely blank page and say "Done" in the status bar? Seems to happen with El Reg comments pages quite often. Anyone else get that? Sometimes when I get bored with hitting reload I copy and paste the URL into IE et voila!"

Nope, never seen that either but why are you going to the hastle of copy/pasting the URL - just install the IE Tab extension and a click of an icon in the status bar reloads the current tab through the IE rendering engine, inside Firefox.

I have been using FF3 for a while now, not the official beta's though, I build it from CVS every day or so. It's definitely improving, but the striking thing to me is the difference in memory usage, it uses next to nothing now, even with a lot of tabs open on pretty 'heavy going' sites.

Also, Firebug does work, but you need the beta version of it. Unfortunately, beta4 broke compatibility with Yslow though. :-(

Anyone who is running FF2....ditch it and get FF3 beta, or better still, build it from CVS. ;-)

The default skin us as ugly as sin on XP, they have created something even worse looking than IE7 and the old default, which must have taken some doing. Thank God for custom skins. Still has that ass-backwards substitute for bookmarking, though thank God the manager is actually working properly now. Still, I guess I'll have to wait for a plugin that fixes creating the damn things seeing as they are so struck with the new system. Otherwise, Opera is starting to look very attractive.

The sad fact is, Opera has had all this for years, and Firefox is only now just getting it.

About the only thing right now, that Firefix has done in this latest beta, which Opera cannot, is the drag/dop on the bookmarks, which still relies on a cumbersome Manage Bookmarks interface.

Well duh guys a new version always breaks most extensions and since FF3 is still beta the chances of updated versions of your extensions is small to nil. Only the most basic (and therefore probably not very useful) extensions will not be broken. This has been the case since before Mozilla 1.0 so why are you complaining now? If you absolutely cannot live without your extensions then alpha or beta versions are not for you.

"Will this version of Firefox still occasionally display a completely blank page and say "Done" in the status bar? Seems to happen with El Reg comments pages quite often. Anyone else get that? Sometimes when I get bored with hitting reload I copy and paste the URL into IE et voila!"

I used to get this with random sites, was an ISP problem, fixed now, all happy again, weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Actually, Noscript and Adblock Plus work fiene in FF Beta 3 (without hacking), so just change your version of Adblock. And thank God the small icons don't look as crufty as the standard ones.

@Steve Wright

"I started running Firefox at Beta3 and its now replaced V2 as my browser of choice."

Absolutely!! I love the page scaling (looks best on the Mac version).

I use an external advert blocker; proxomitron in my case. I'll be moving to privoxy soon as it runs on linux. I recommend doing this rather than an addon as it will work with all browsers at any stage of development, and it seems quite flexible.

For a filter list I download the huge hosts files from mvps and elsewhere and turn them into a blocklist. Easy. It would be nice to aggregate them together and make it public..

Dealing with flash shite loaded by jscript is easy - I use noscript. Unfortunately killing scripting breaks many incompetently designed sites which rely unnecessarily on scripting and flash. I notice the worst offenders tend to be US based, although twats like british telecom can't do a basic site without scripting either. Who's surprised?

Regarding memory, that's been a bugbear of mine too. A quick look at the code suggested they used a conservative GC for FF2, which would explain the slow and steady bloatage.

While it has always been the case that FF suffered from memory leak issues that are being aggressively addressed for FF3, addons have always been culprits for exacerbating the issue. Mozilla are identifying the offending addons so hopefully over time this should improve the situation further.

They are also trying to get the most used addons compatible with FF3 in time for the final release.

Been using Alpha and Beta's of FF3 for ages. FF2 been sat languishing on my PC's since the first Beta was available.

"The sad fact is, Opera has had all this for years, and Firefox is only now just getting it."

Well, the exciting news here Mark is now, the rest of the world can use these long overdue features in a large-scale cross-platform, mainstream browser. It is recognized that the 6 people who use Opera have had these for sometime.

It's even made it into debian repos and everything.

Privoxy does indeed, proxomitron AFAIK does not. The comma I omitted rather screwed the meaning; it should have read

"I'll be moving to privoxy soon, as it runs on linux."

An object lesson in my punctuation.

The one with the picture of a panda eating leaves on the back. Ta.

"Well, the exciting news here Mark is now, the rest of the world can use these long overdue features in a large-scale cross-platform, mainstream browser. It is recognized that the 6 people who use Opera have had these for sometime."

I believe Opera resides on more *popular* platforms than Firefox, with its Mini incarnation as well as for certain commodity devices such as the Wii and newer Archos PMPs. That said, user base is probably not far off that figure; there's no accounting for taste, is there...

(Posted using Opera 9)

Terrible for snobs like me who always sniggered at people typing into the location bar when they should have been using the search bar or history or bookmarks.

It now works so well at searching the history and bookmarks is best done by typing straight into the location bar.

Just switch off compatibility checking. I run all add-ons from FF2 (I've been doing it for a while) and everything's perfect. Except missing bar in CoolIris Previews, but I never used it anyway, so no crying.

Just google how to do it.

Yep, I get that blank page saying "Done" thing too, and have always thought it rather odd.

I notice it most when clicking to 'find out more' about the various Security Updates M$ are keen for me to install each month. Now I dunno whether to download FF3 beta for the hell of it, or the IE plugin for V2 and play it safe?

Ironically, Google are the only ones holding me back.

When will Google Toolbar be released for FF3???