Firefox version 3 beta

Firefox version 3 beta is available for sometime. I started using it for last few days. It's been good.

Ever since I switched to Firefox 3 years ago from IE, I have never gone back. It is such a nice browser. Browsing is so smooth. So fast and it loads in no time. Compare that with IE. With every new version, it has become slower and uglier. I use IE to browse only those pages in some Indian languages which Firefox does not seem to render fonts correctly. I am sure there is some setting which can be changed or some additional fonts to install. I have not done it well or simple tasks such as changing encoding does not work. Another place I am forced to use IE is to watch movies online from Netflix. Their DRM scheme works only in IE and you can not watch movies online using Netflix. That's about it and rest all only using Firefox.

Firefox version 3, performance seems to have further improved. Seems faster and smoother for most of the pages. I would have preferred UI to have remained same. Some things they have changed are not very intuitive. For example, home button has disappeared. You can get it back but it is not very clear. I had to Google to find out how. Another pet peeve is the disappearance of nice separate menu item for bookmarks for live feeds. That has its own tool bar now but is not that user friendly. I can live with those annoyances for better performance.

So far no problems. Being beta, it is bound to have some issues. They have built a nice feedback utility which can transfer back the information if and when the browser crashes. That's neat. So far in last 3 days, it crashed only once.

I hope a day will come when I do not ever have to use IE. It's such a dog of a browser.

Cheers to Firefox and Mozilla for such a nice browser and for free.

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