Firefox 3 Arrives

With both a bang (from a gazillion people hitting reload and/or check for updates) and a whimper (from the Mozilla servers trying to survive the onslaught).

Fun times.

What most people did not understand is that if they were already running RC3, there was not going to be a real difference between that and 3.0. It would be OK to wait an hour or three before downloading the damn thing. I got tired of using check for updates, so after the first two hours I went to the download page.

And there it was. Basically identical to RC3 as I expected it.

(as I type this I realized that I forgot to upgrade it on Windows, duh!)

I just checked CPU usage, less than 30%, not exactly terrible. The killer feature for me is the awesome bar:



As you type into the address bar, it searches your history. I really love it because sometimes I have to hit three versions of the same URL while working on something (I may be looking at a project's production server, while looking at the maintenance and staging copies at the same time) and it is really sweet to type three arbitrary parts of the url and have the one you want scroll up to the top of the list. I have no idea about who came up with this concept but it is pure genius.

Funny, I checked my Windows version again, it is showing as 3.0, not as a beta. I have no clue how and when it was updated since I haven't run the damned thing in days.

I tried to use Foxmarks for centralized bookmarks, but it is a worse solution than Google Bookmarks (which requires the Google Toolbar to be of any real use). I actually managed to export my Google Bookmarks into Safari, then into Firefox and finally into Foxmarks. Firefox 3 choked bad simply by dragging more than a dozen bookmark folders. After an hour of fighting it, I deleted the extension, cleaned the bookmarks and resumed using Google Bookmarks and the Toolbar.

As for performance, it is hard to gauge since this is a dual core CPU, but at least I can tell it isn't choking the machine or eating up all of the memory. With 5 tabs open it is hovering at 30% or less.