Mozilla ships Firefox 3 Beta 5

Mozilla just dropped me a note announcing the release of Firefox 3 Beta 5:

Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and Web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

What’s new and improved in Firefox 3 Beta 5:

Easier to Use:

Integration with Windows: Firefox now has improved Windows icons, and uses native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.

Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.

Integration with Linux: Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.

More Personal:

Places Organizer: view, organize and search through all of your bookmarks, tags, and browsing history with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches.  Create and restore full backups whenever you want.

Improved Performance:

Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 5, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5

Installing now...

Discuss this Article 4

weedmonk
on Apr 2, 2008
Looks much sleeker. I personally use small icons so the whole keyhole thing is a non-issue. All in all I'm starting to regain faith in FF3 Team.
jmoo2
on Apr 2, 2008
It is fast but given no plug-ins are compatible with it yet I'm not sure how valid the speed test (with plugins) is. Although the UI is a little improved it's still awful. Can't wait until somebody comes out with a "proper" Vista skin! James
clindhartsen
on Apr 2, 2008
Trying out the new build via. the portable version (http://portableapps.com/) and it does seem speedier than past ones for sure, though the UI is still horrid.
Waethorn
on Apr 4, 2008
"The UI sucks, but otherwise not too bad." as far as i can tell, they only really increased the colour count on the icons, and changed the back button from green to blue. i still like IE7 better - 2 small lines for the whole UI, and no legacy-style menu anymore.

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