Unofficial Firefox 3 Beta 1 release for Mac and Linux

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, November 7, 2007 @ 11:50 am

Occasionally, in-between the latest iPod rumors and stupid top-10 lists from Cracked, Digg coughs up the good stuff. Case in point: today's post about Firefox 3 Beta 1. So far it's only available for Mac and Linux, and the download directory includes the following "IMPORTANT NOTE":

These files are not release versions, they are just potential release
versions. Use them at your own risk, without any of the warnings that we
will be putting in the release notes.

To be honest, if you're here from Digg or something similar, we'd really
rather you waited until 3.0b1 was officially announced, so the servers
don't get overloaded and we don't have a bunch of extra work to do.

Because I'm a bad citizen - and because I didn't see the note till afterward - I downloaded the beta and installed it on my Macbook Pro. All my extensions, of course, got disabled immediately. Still, I'm already impressed with the interface improvements. The Places concept looks promising. The bookmarks manager is VASTLY more useful and intuitive. And the download manager, though a little iffy on usability, has some cool new bells and whistles, especially the ability to interact with your downloaded files from within the manager itself.

Also, strangely, dropdowns and other form elements now have the native Mac OS look-and-feel: rounded corners and all that jazz. Is this is new feature, or just something that was always there but hidden by my extensions?

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Comments: 3 so far

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1. 

   I think what you’re seeing are the first steps Firefox is taking to integrate the native os feel:

   http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/10/10/the-firefox-3-visual-refresh-system-integration/

   Comment by Mark, Wednesday, November 7, 2007 @ 12:54 pm

2. 

   Thanks for the link, Mark. Folks should also check out this post for the Firefox 3 UI roadmap:

   http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/06/01/the-user-interface-of-firefox-3-features/

   Comment by Brian Dillard, Wednesday, November 7, 2007 @ 1:44 pm

3. 

   Since it wasn’t actually an official release, access to the beta release candidate has been restricted. Read here for details:

   http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2007/11/07/were-happy-that-you-digg-us-but/

   Comment by Brian Dillard, Thursday, November 8, 2007 @ 11:06 am

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