No doubt you’ve all downloaded and installed your copy of Mozilla Firefox 3 by now, contributing to the 8 million downloads on Download Day 2008.
My initial observations are that Firefox 3 is significantly faster, both in terms of starting up (even with my favourite 20 add-ons installed) and page rendering. The great news is that this includes SiteManager.
Having only used the new browser for a couple of hours, both at home and at work, I was keen to ensure that there were no performance issues when using Firefox 3 when editing content in SiteManager. Quite the opposite: I was amazed to see just how quickly pages now load. Performance with SiteManager is remarkably faster in Firefox 3 than it ever was in Firefox 2 or IE7. It’s certainly worth checking out.
Most of my add-ons still work, including my critical add-ons such as Firebug, Web Developer and Stylish meaning that I can still tweak the SiteManager UI.
There’s no going back now: Firefox 3 is clearly the way forward!
Gareth @ St Andrews
Update
Looks like my enthusiasm was short-lived. We’re experiencing the same issues with the media library that Duncan has reported. It looks like you can add one document from the media library to a page but no more … unless you then update the content (to save it) and then restart Firefox.
I do hope that Firefox 3 will soon be supported fully. In the meantime I’m relying on Portable Firefox 2.0.0.14 which can be installed alongside Firefox 3.0.
We have had a number of reports of FF3 issues on T4 – not least a real problem with using the Media Library and a litany of odd formatting errors – especially with respect to the improved use of screen real-estate introduced in later versions of T4.
Looks like the issue with Firefox 3 is to do with Mozilla removing the range.compareNode method from Gecko 1.9.
I’ve heard that this has been fixed in the next build of SiteManager (subject to successful testing).