Alan, the Firefox site says it's being released as a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback and is being made available for testing purposes only.

Mike

I read a really good review the other day in MaximumPC magazine.

It may be super fast because the RCs don't allow plugins yet, I seem to have read?

Anyway, they said it was extremely stable and fast. I'm disappointed lately with V2, it can get stuck and really eat up the cpu cycles after running for a while.

Ive been using it since it was available and its easily head and shoulders above all other browsers.

Yea, its a lot faster. Been using it for a while now----off and on. My only issue is that most on the plugins for FF2 don't work on FF3, but then some are incorporated into FF3/. FF3 will kick EI8 butt from what I've seem, and we know EI7 was lost in the Br Triangle with Vista ;-)

And my experience has been quite a bit different...I downloaded and installed RC1 right over top of my FF2 install...and it was underwhelming to say the least. Lots of hanging, spinning graphics etc etc.

Certainly not a noticeable improvement over FF2 (which I have since reinstalled since 3 was bugging me too much).

Maybe it was the fact that I went right over top of FF2 - but I did not see the "speed" that many say they are seeing....

VP

And my experience has been quite a bit different...I downloaded and installed RC1 right over top of my FF2 install...and it was underwhelming to say the least. Lots of hanging, spinning graphics etc etc.

it specifically says do NOT install directly on top of 2. you DID follow the instructions & read the release notes & known bugs before installing, right? :D

Plugins work fine. If they're FF3 compatible. Only 1 of mine is & there's four that are blacklisted due to insecurity.

it specifically says do NOT install directly on top of 2. you DID follow the instructions & read the release notes & known bugs before installing, right?

Well...there ya go. Gonna try it again....thank you!

VP

Both my son and a nephew insist on using Firefox, so I've used it. Seems fine, but I don't notice any huge performance improvement. In what way is it faster? Even on my ancient computers, IE seems pretty quick. Believe me, I'm a speed fanatic, so I usually notice when something is sluggish or slow.

I also never upgrade. I'm still using XP SP1 on this computer, and haven't updated in four years. No anti-virus, etc. I'm running IE 6.0.2800. Perhaps it is the later IE versions that have become slow.

at least you're not using EI5 ;-) between what is written up and my experience has between better memory management on large pages and multi opened tabs, better code execution,(especially on older cpus on simple HTML/javascript? pages), graphics handling is supposed to be vastly improved, - I'm still trying to rate how much ( graphic cards and dx9/10 control this feature increase - I believe)

"EI" ?

"EI" ? IE5..... ;-) EI= Evil and Inept MS browsers

tried it - was faster in all aspects but;

a. there's almost zero add-ons/extensions, yes there's some overlap with the new built-in functions, but nowhere like the flexibility i have now, with say just mouse gestures.

b. the new bookmarks is a pain getting used to (hell, i HATE change).

so i didn't keep it, but i'll certainly be looking at it again when they're up to speed with the add-ons....

leslie