RutSum

Firefox 3 Beta 4 On PCLinuxOS

It’s the time of the year when software developers are most active, and so we have a lot of new versions of popular applications being released. Firefox 3 Beta 4 was released yesterday, and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 earlier this week. Opera 9.5 Beta 1 (Kestrel) was released a month ago. I recently blogged about how these browsers fared in the just released Acid3 test.

Now that I had finally got complacent with my PCLinuxOS 2008 MiniME Installation, I decided to try out these ‘forbidden’ alpha and beta releases.

I downloaded the Firefox 3 Beta 4 archive from the official site, which was 8.5 MB in size. This release covers up over 900 bugs discovered in the previous release, Beta 3.


Installation

For the installation, I unzipped the tar archive into my /opt/ folder. This created a folder, /opt/firefox/ , which had a shell script named firefox. I created a symlink to this shell script in my /usr/bin folder, named firefox3.


$ cd /usr/bin
$ sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox firefox3


Now I can launch Firefox just by pressing Alt + F2 and typing firefox3.



Features

I was highly impressed by the blazing fast speed. It was even snappier and quicker than Opera. It asked me if I wanted to import my bookmarks and other settings from Opera, which I agreed to.

The first thing you notice in the new Beta is the sleek interface. The tabs and toolbars look smoother, and the switching and scrolling is surprisingly fluid, and not jerky like the previous versions.

A new feature that I saw was cache search. Anything you type in your toolbar, is not only searched in your visited URL history, but also on page descriptions, and your whole cache. This feature comes in handy when you remember a part of the content, but neither remember the URL or the name of the website/page.

UPDATE (29/03/2008) : Mozilla calls this feature an "awesome bar", because it not only searches the cache, it offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history.

This version also includes smart bookmarking features. A star appears on the right of the address bar for every URL. To bookmark a page, all you have to do is click that star button. By default, these bookmarks are stored in an ‘Unfiled Bookmarks’ directory, and appear only in your Bookmarks Library, which is accessible from the Bookmarks drop-down menu. By clicking on that star again, you can edit the settings for the bookmark, like change it’s name or include it in a different directory (Bookmarks Menu, Bookmarks Toolbar). You can also add tags for a bookmark to club similar bookmarks together.

As a die-hard Opera fanboy, the one thing that I thought was missing was the custom search feature. You could set a keyword for any search box on the whole World Wide Web, and then search that site by typing that keyword, followed by the search query in your address bar. But I was proven wrong by the new Firefox. Right click on any search box, and you get an ‘Add a keyword for this search’ option in the drop-down menu. The site is automatically bookmarked, and you can add a search keyword for it.

Even though Firefox3 has completely blown me off the roof, I am currently not using it because of the unavailability of the ‘mouse gestures’ add-on for it, which I simply cannot live without. Of course, when the final version is released, the add-on will be upgraded to work with it.

UPDATE : Ed Burnette of ZDNet reports that Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and 3 times faster than Firefox 2.

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