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<p>The Firefox team has dropped the first official beta for the upcoming Firefox 3. Although still primarily meant for developers, Firefox 3 beta 1 showcase some of the changes in store for the final release due sometime later this year.</p>
<p>Once the only real alternative to Internet Explorer 6, the final release of Firefox 3 will see a significantly changed browser market. With recent versions of Opera available for free, the much improved IE7 installed by default in Vista and Apple's svelte Safari 3 all entering the browser fray, Firefox 3 will have its work cut out for it for it. </p>
<p>Though Firefox remains popular, many users have criticized the perceived bloat and massive memory use of Firefox 2. Mozilla hopes to change that perception with Firefox 3 and the first beta is indeed slimmer and sleeker than its predecessors.</p>
<p>Although it isn't intended to be used by the general public, the first beta of Firefox 3 is an important milestone for Mozilla and shows that, though it may be a bit behind schedule, Firefox 3 remains on track both in reducing memory usage and bring some new features to the table.</p>
<p>In my informal testing of beta 1, the browser never consumed more than 60MB of memory and when running in the background it disappeared from my CPU usage monitor entirely, something Firefox 2 has never managed to do. Of course, I've been running it sans extensions and it's entirely possible that my experiences with memory leaks come from extensions.</p>
<p>To that end Mozilla has said in the past that it will be stepping up efforts to help add-on creators track and eliminate bugs in popular extensions.</p>
<p>Firefox 3 beta 1 is noticeably snappier than its predecessors, page loads are quicker and AJAX style refreshes like GMail happen almost without you noticing them.</p>
<p>While the speed alone is likely to convince many people to upgrade, Firefox 3 has some nice new features as well. Not everything planned for the final release has made it into beta 1, but there's plenty of new features, especially if you haven't followed all the alpha releases very closely.</p>
<p>Beta 1 features a new bookmarks management system dubbed Places, which aims to help you keep your bookmarks organized and easy to find. Recent alpha builds included Places, but were incomplete in implementing all the planned features. Even now Places doesn't look completely baked, but it's close enough to be very useful. Places supports bookmarking tools borrowed from social sites like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, including tags and starring to classify, organize and prioritize your favorites. </p>
<p>The new features aren't relegated to the Places panel either, you'll find them right in the main location bar on the right hand side where you'll notice a new star icon. Press the icon once and page is starred, press it again and small panel pops up allow you to edit your bookmark without having to open the Places panel.</p>
<p>screen1</p>
<p>Unfortunately I encountered a bug with this, although clicking the star claimed to create a bookmark in the folder "all bookmarks" when I opened up the Places panel, the bookmark was nowhere to be found. Changing the folder to anything else worked without issue.</p>
<p>The new star icon isn't the only change for the location bar. In fact the Location bar isn't just a location bar anymore, it's also a full text search bar for finding bookmarks or pages stored in your browsing history. Rather than just searching for page titles and URLs the way Firefox 2 does, the new version looks for keywords within the page text itself, making it much easier to find what you're looking for even when you don't know where you saw it. The feature is still somewhat temperamental in beta 1.</p>
<p>Other changes in the URL bar include dropping the age old padlock symbol for secure sites. Mozilla has pointed out that using the lock symbol to show encryption can be a false cue since you can be securely connected to a scam site. Rather than the simple lock, Firefox 3 beta 1 features a clickable favicon which displays a panel reporting the page's connection status. An additional link will open a panel that displays even more information like whether or not the site is bookmarked, how often you've visited the page and any saved passwords you might have stored.</p>
<p>screen2</p>
<p>Some early mockups of Firefox 3 showed much of that additional information in the favicon drop-down, but for the beta 1 at least, you'll need to click through to see the extra info.</p>
<p>Other changes include many streamlined user interface elements, like the revamped add-ons manager. The add-on manager now features a tab for managing plug-ins like the Flash player or Quicktime, including the ability to disable them as well as links to find any additional plugins you might need. The add-ons panel also features an always displayed "restart Firefox" button for quickly enabling and disabling extensions, themes and plugins. Previously this button only showed up when you installed new plugins.</p>
<p>screen3</p>
<p>The downloads panel has also been improved, adding a new info icon that tell you not only where the download is on your hard drive, but also where it came from originally. There's also a small search bar at the bottom of the panel for finding those needles in the haystack of your downloads.</p>
<p>Although beta 1 is far from a finished products and some interesting changes, like platform specific skins, are still in store before the final release, if you don't mind losing your add-ons the speed and memory solutions in beta 1 just might make it worth the upgrade.</p>
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