Firefox 3 beta 4 is out.

Mozilla released Firefox 3 beta 4 last night. Over 900 improvements over the previous release? Better integration? Better memory management? Improved functionality? Reportedly 2-3 times faster than Firefox 2.

Seems to be working well so far! It does seem to be faster than FF2.

It runs ok, still nowhere near as fast as Camino
nightly or Webkit nightly.

I installed it this afternoon for a couple of hours and ran the only three of the extensions I run that I could find would work. It's faster than 2.0.0.12.

It wouldn't load SmoothWheel, not because the extension is out of date for the beta but because the author hadn't included a secure update certificate. I know the site is safe because I've been using it for years. There's a newer smoothwheel-type extension by another author, but it won't load because it's good only for Beta 3.

The older SmoothWheel was loading until the newly evolved Mozilla nanny state rejected it. Someone is sure to write an extension that will bounce the nanny out the door.

I've really enjoyed beta 3, so I was quite excited about beta 4. Unfortunately, it's just not as stable. I've been using it all day today and had FF crap out at least a half dozen times during normal use. I hope beta 5 comes out quickly.

I've been using b4 all day and have had no difficulties with it at all.

Non of my plug-ins are working, but this is pretty normal with any beta that I've tested. Was kind of hoping they would integrate a better cookie manager. Been using Cookieculler, but I'm not sure how up to date it is.

So far, so good with beta 4. Code freeze for beta 5 is March 18th.

cwa107 said:

I've really enjoyed beta 3, so I was quite excited about beta 4. Unfortunately, it's just not as stable. I've been using it all day today and had FF crap out at least a half dozen times during normal use. I hope beta 5 comes out quickly.

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Beta 3 was doing 70 on the new Acid 3 test but Beta 4 went down to 67 for me.

The latest WebKit build is doing 90 on Acid 3 which is way better than anything else out there at this point and is VERY fast.

I've had no problems with Beta 4 crashing on me, whats WebKit?

tmorgan1689 said:

I've had no problems with Beta 4 crashing on me, whats WebKit?

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Webkit is the rendering engine for Safari (the basis for the browser).

I cant get beta 4 to launch. It will launch once, and i create a new profile (so that it doesn't destroy my v2.0 profile. It runs fine. I quit and relaunch, choose the v3 profile and it quits silently. How disappointing.

tmorgan1689 said:

I've had no problems with Beta 4 crashing on me, whats WebKit?

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http://webkit.org/

This is easier, tells you if you need a new nightly, sometimes they have 3 in a day. Some are faster than a speeding bullet, some aren't. All are faster than FF.
http://nightly.webkit.org/start/trunk/30966