Beyond Firefox 2 – Testing Minefield (Firefox 3)

OK, so everyone is very excited about Firefox 2. I’m excited, your excited, all the social networks are ablaze.

But development does not stop at whole numbers, and the testing must go on – which is how we got here.

So I’m testing Firefox 3 (Minefield). That’s right, I won’t be outdone. I must run the most unstable software. Well at least on the test boxes. So currently the Vista, Leopard, and Edgy boxes are running “firefox-3.0a1″.

The first things you will notice are the graphics – everything has a nice sheen to it (in fact, looks just like Firefox 2!), while remaining true to the normal Firefox UI. Also of note is the fact that favorites are now run using a SQLite3 database. For the full list of features, head on over to the Burning Edge page.

Firefox 3 Minefield Toolbar
Firefox 3.0a1 Toolbar
Firefox 3 Minefield Tabs
New Tabs in Firefox 3.0a1 Minefield

As far as I can tell this is just as stable as Bon Echo was (that’s right – was stable for me), with inline spell-checking and some other fancy goodies.That’s all for now, some more screenshots from other platforms (other than Windows XP of course) and crash reports as they happen

Note: of course this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I’m sorry for the Mozilla devs. We all need to stop worrying about the cutting edge and appreciate what we have – fantastic browsers! Opera, Safari, IE7 and Firefox are all great, really.