Review: First look at Firefox 3 Alpha 6

For those who haven't heard, the new alpha for Firefox 3, Gran Paradiso Alpha 6, was released a few days ago. I've been using Alpha 5 on Linux for a while now, and I can say that it's pretty fast, much faster than Firefox 2. Since Alpha 6 was recently released, I decided to download it and test it out.


If you look at the screenshot, you can see that it's not much different from Firefox 2. That's because most of the changes on Gran Paradiso are not visible by the user.

All but one (Adblock Plus) of my previous extensions were disabled because they were not compatible with this new version. However, as GP enters beta testing and the final version draws near, most developers will upgrade their extensions to work with it. If you just can't wait, there's an extension called Nightly Tester Tools that can force incompatible extensions to work.

There is, however, a new feature in the Addons Manager that will most probably make life easier for extension and theme fans: a permanent "Restart" button. Previously, this button only appeared when you installed new extensions and themes. This way, you can easily disable and re-enable extensions and change themes.

But that's really the only visible change in Firefox 3a6. The rest of the changes are 'under the hood'.

One of them is a new version of SQLite. You've probably heard that Firefox 3 will feature a faster Bookmarks/History/Feeds engine built on this database (know as 'Places'), so a newer version means better performance and new features.

Another simply AWESOME feature it has is that when you change the text size on a webpage (for example, by holding Ctrl and moving the mousewheel), the setting are preserved. The next time you open that webpage, the text size will be the same as you configured it the last time. I've been waiting for this feature for a VERY long time.

There have also been changes to rendering engine to make text look better. If you read lots of Thai pages, for example, the script should be better supported in this version. Also, the Download Manager has been improved somewhat. For the whole list of changes, check out the release notes.

Overall, this version of Firefox, although it is an Alpha still, is extremely stable and very fast. It is certainly NOT Alpha quality; it's more like Release Candidate quality. However, the recommendation is to not use it for other than testing purposes, since it is still in an early step of development and might be prone to lots of serious bugs.