On Tuesday, Mozilla released yet another beta (Beta 5) for its effervescent browser to be, Firefox 3. It's been four weeks since beta 4 has been out, and seems some major bugs have been taken care of in the latest beta version (that's what Mozilla said). Many of these improvements in beta 5 have been incorporated based on community feedback from the previous beta, the company claims.
Apparently, the release (of Beta 5) has been delayed a bit due to some issues with a serious bug in the Mac version of the browser that needed some time to be fixed, the company said. And as is the case with all beta releases, this one too is labeled as a "developer preview release" and hopes to receive further maturity with the help of Web developers and Mozilla's testing community. Mozilla claims that Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes over and above the previous beta that make for improved stability and Web compatibility, and enhanced user interface -- in turn resulting in the fastest Firefox ever.
Specifically, Beta 5 now features an improved integration with Windows, Mac OS X, as well as Linux operating systems. New features like the location bar auto-complete, bookmark back-up and restore, full page zoom, and others, have been made slicker. Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security of the browser have also been introduced. Other continued performance improvements involve changes to the JavaScript engine, and speed of Web applications like Google Mail and Zoho.
Lastly, Mozilla says this will be the last beta (let's hope so) before a sparkling "Firefox 3.0" is released for the public to download and use. The expected release of that is sometime in June.
Great, keep up the good work.
I use Ancestry.co.uk to do my genealogy and thier viwer has an enhanced version, I realise this version of Firefox is in its beta 5 but can you try and sort this little hickup out.
Every time I try and load the enhanced viewer I get an eror message
Firefox could not install this item because "install-a8..rdf" (provided by the item) is not well-formed or does not exist. Please contact the author about this problem.
I hope you can do a patch for the next release
Thanks
by Steve Bishop
from Hitchin
on 05/04/08 04:00 AM
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