A Look at Firefox v3 Beta 3

Saturday February 23, 2008 

I’m a long time supporter of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, based on it’s stability, customization, and the wide range of add-ons that can make the firefox installation uniquely yours. When the version 3 betas (and even the alphas) came out, I wanted to jump in and give them a try, but each time I went away thinking that they needed to put some more work into it.

Admittedly there are big warnings all over the installation that tell you that it’s a development release, and really shouldn’t be used for a production environment. They’re right about that. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a better experience with Beta 3, although this one was probably my doing more than anything.

When I first installed it, I did everything that was recommended - create a unique profile to avoid torching your stable version, etc. And when I got it running, I was impressed. Things were a LOT better than they had been in the previous versions. And it was a lot faster, as well, although this may have been due to the fact that there were no extensions installed.

I played around with it for a few minutes, and was really considering putting it into use as the primary version on my work machine, and then I remembered that I’d seen on Lifehacker somewhere that you could make your extensions compatible with the version 3 beta. I should have left well enough alone, but that’s not what I like to do.

Essentially you go into Firefox’s configuration and tell it two things:

  • If an extension is not compatible with this version, ignore that fact and run it anyway
  • If an extension is a security risk, ignore that fact and run it anyway

Scary, huh? Now you know why it’s not recommended for a production machine (among other reasons). So I gave it a try and things seemed to be going all right, until I restarted the app after the extensions were installed.

And then it crashed on startup. And again. And again. Uh oh. I uninstalled and reinstalled the whole thing and tried again, but this time didn’t drop all of the extensions in at once. And it happened again. With the IE Tab extension, I believe.

Oh well, let’s go back to 2.0.11 and life can continue on. Uninstalled the beta and started up v2. And found that all of my settings had been removed again. This was not cool.

I keep all of my extensions stored on my local machine, and my bookmarks are in del.icio.us, but still. If I hadn’t had the stuff saved, I would have been screwed, big time. Part of the risk of dealing with beta software, I guess.

So, long and short of it is, if you want to give Firefox 3 Beta 3 a try, go ahead, but go in with your eyes open and know that there could be potential problems.

And be sure to let me know how you make out.

I’ll be waiting for the release version, thanks.

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