Beta 5 looked a little slicker, but was less stable on my machine. It also broke a number of add-ons that didn't work quite properly even after modifying the about:config. I went back to Beta 4; I'll probably wait until the plugin updates or until Beta 6 shows up to upgrade again.

Opera is cool but it doesn't allow the GUI to be modified much. Just replaces the buttons and background color, nothing else. Does firefox for OS X allow the GUI to be modded further? I'm talking stuff like Window Transparency or animated backgrounds. I'd love a transparent/animated bg for the speed dial in Opera.

If you want to install an extension, download it first with other browser, ie6,7 opera, etc., save it to some folder.
you will see a file with XPI extension. But is a ZIP file.
In the zip archive you will find a file called install.rdf
this is a text file edit it with notepad or something else (I use pspad)
look for:
[code]
<!-- FireFox -->
<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
<em:minVersion>1.5</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>3.0</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>
[/code]
maxVersion must be 3.0

next: in firefox: File -> Open File -> [the file.xpi]

Did the sunspider in 3.1 seconds with Firebox 3 Beta 5.
Internet Explorer 7 was 20.9 seconds.

WOW...that made me try it for myself.. I did the same test on my laptop (Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz T9300, 4GB ram on Vista Home Premium 64Bit)...

http://korayem.net/post/2008/04/03/Battle-of-the-browsers-The-Javas...

The Firefox team is doing magical stuff to their engine leaving both Opera and IE teams with some serious competition....the closest match is IE8 and it's 2x slower!!

GOD DAMNIT ! The default skin is broken on OS X ! ARGH :(

I have 2 back and 2 forward buttons.. Looks like someone didn't QA this thing properly for OS X. For a last beta, this is almost insulting for all the Mac users as beta 4 was fine.

Adi

I like everything about FF 3 Beta 5 (aside from the incompatible plugins) except for one thing - disk access. I mean, it's so much faster, and the full-screen zoom is just nice... but...

My C: HDD is loud, so I know when it's working. And indeed, just looking at task manager, FF has written 63 megs in the last couple hours... and I've only opened a few tabs and saved a single 14 kb file (Creative_Drivers_By_Daniel_k_01_April_2008_Digiex.net.torrent, if you're curious). But it writes in short little bursts at annoying times.

It's strange - I have 750 MB ram free, and I have 9 tabs open (none with any flash or large images). And yet, if I open a new tab, there's a buzz of disk activity and another MB gets written.

Since I started writing here, I'm now up to 66.2 MB written (I opened up 2 tabs to experiment).

What's the deal? Is Firefox trying to do virtual memory manually on my C: hard drive? Because that's utterly stupid. I put a manually allocated contiguous swapfile on a different physical HDD for a reason.

Anyone else have this problem? I should mention that I am using FF3b5 from about 5 days ago, before the official release, so I'm curious if it is still a problem... and if there is an about:config entry that regulates it. Unfortunately "find" does not work on about:config so I can't search for the string "Browser.retarded_behavior = true" or "automatic.thrash_primary_partition = take_it_and_like_it" whatever.

Edit: Now it's up to 72 megs, and all I did since 66.2 was finish typing and post this reply! I'm so confused. I mean, I understand about browser caching, but you can't cache 10x as much as you physically download... or cache stuff for 5 minutes while staring at an unchanging page... or spend 2 seconds and a megabyte writing a 14k file.

Definitely snappier, but still a memory pig. Sigh.

And yes, I get the constant disk access as well.

Gah! What are all those annoying flashy blocks trying to sell me stuff?!?!?!

Oh. Adblock doesn't work with this version yet. ;)

Seems pretty fast. I likee.

Good, god, Firefox 2.0.12 took 20 seconds on that 'sunspider' test, this new Beta took less than 5. I've been using the 3.0 Beta on one of my test VMs, and didn't really pay much attention. Gmail is much, much faster with 3.0b5, pity I didn't install it on one of my main machines earlier.

I'm now using beta 5 and I can definatly see that they have fixed any annoyances and rough edges in the UI, including putting the home button back on the main toolbar and reducing the font on the drop down suggestions when typing in a URL, much much better and it does indeed seem even snappier! Very impressed!

Weird. Hitting "reply" brings me to the bottom of the jazztags in this version of FF.

Oh well. It is so fast so I'm sticking with it.

already using it myself, definitely seems pretty snappy.

however, it broke every extension except for NoScript and my gmail notifier

Most of the time the extensions aren't really broken. You can open the xpi as a zip, edit a text file to include the new version and then rezip, rename.