Saturday 15 March 2008

Firefox 3 Beta 4, download it. And why I want to go AppleMac

I've previously recommended downloading Firefox 3 which is in a beta stage and is not widely distributed. The beta 2 I recommended was superseded by beta 3 and very recently by beta 4. Beta 3 was unstable on the main computer I use, but not so much on another work one, both running Windows XP.

Sadly I'm still purely a Windows user but I'm planning my escape to Macintosh Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) on a current model MacBook (AppleMac laptop/notebook) in the next few months. I will be free. Check out this very independent, objective and detailed comparison of Linux, Mac Leopard, Windows XP, and Windows Vista in PC World to see why I want to make the shift. In fact just do a search for wesbites which discuss Macintosh and see a great many reasons from many sources, and talk to anyone who made the switch.

Back to Firefox. Beta 3 kept freezing and crashing on my computer at home, Beta 4 is great. As it's beta there's a limited choice of themes and extensions but the MicroFox theme is available which is a beautiful one, and the most important application for me, the nitro pdf download, is working. British English dictionary, ScribeFire and FireFlag are working. Beta 4 is very stable and very quick. Downloads are much faster than before. Beautifully minimised graphics create very spacious and ergonomic feel. Bookmarking is very rapid, straight from browser bar, and it's very very easy now to get to previously visited website by entering word from site title in window. The best aesthetics aspects of Safari (Apple) browser are now marched through a very integrated feel unfiying elements and a sense of curvature in three dimensions. Internet Explorer does not begin to compare.

Come on people, Internet Explorer is not a good browser, try Firefox and you'll know what I mean. Go on try it. If you want to play very safe, download Firefox 2 from the button on my side bar. If you're feeling just a little adventerous download 3 beta 4. Whichever you download, you won't disable Explorer. You can download easily and quickly, You don't even have to restart the computer to get it working after download. No risk, no trouble. Go on, do it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great to see you like our Firefox extension, thanks for the support!

--
Chris Dahl – Chief Technology Officer
Nitro PDF Software
www.nitropdf.com
_____________________________________

The original Acrobat® alternative,
and the easiest to use PDF software, period.

"Product of the Year" – PC User
"Product of the Year" – Small Business Technology Magazine

Anonymous said...

My main problem with Firefox is that I have not been able to find an rss feed reader that is as good as the one built into IE. Sage seems to come closest to what I want, but even it has problems. (The biggest problem with Sage is that it does not automatically distinguish blogs with new, unread content from blogs without any new content.) If someone could point me to an feed reader add-on for Firefox that works as well as IE, I'd switch to Firefox. But until then I will probably stick with IE.

Barry Stocker said...

Hello David

Thanks for your comment A rare example of someone who has co0mpared Firefpox and Explorer and prefers the latter. Your issue is very specific. I was not even aware of how Explore deals with RSS. I've just checked. You can't do that with Firefox, but you can get what you want by using Google Reader or Bloglines. Book mark them, maybe keep a tab or tabs permanently open. I'm not aware of a Firefox add on, IE tab, that can replicate the Explorer experience. You can keep get an add on which means that within a tab you can switch very easily between Firefox and Explorer,and you can keep one or more Explorer tans open while staying with Firefox. This works for the FF 3 betas but not FF 2. I really do recommend downloading FF 3 beta 4, it's very stable and is a great browsing experience. You can download it from here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419