Firefox 3 beta 1 is finally here and I’ve installed it on two different machines and had two completely different experiences.

The first setup I installed on was at work, and I will just say Windows XP SP2 with 512MB of RAM. After installing, Fx3 would just consume all the RAM for some unknown reason until I could kill it or hard-restart my machine. I never found out what went wrong, and probably won’t.

The second setup I installed on was at home, and this was a lot smoother. Note though that depending on the extension, it can break Fx3 hard. So just be careful. My impressions, excellent. This is a beta, and Mozilla betas tend to be good. There are lots of user interface tweaks, but the big changes are yet to happen with a new theme for each operating system. For now it is fine.

It feels a lot faster than 2.0. Possibly due to the new rendering engine it uses (Cairo). It also doesn’t eat as much RAM as 2, but there is still room for improvement (and this is only if you discount my first experience).

Places is finally in this build, and unfortunately I think it adds a bit of confusion. Places was originally a concept for 2, but was dropped due it needing a lot more time. Places replaces your bookmarks and history as a single repository of everything that you go to or have been. It replaces these with a database driven system using SQLite to provide some performance improvements. This also means that the old Netscape 2.0 bookmarks.html is now retired, and the hideous history system is taken out back.

So what benefits does this make? Well, personally I hope that the interface to Places is improved as even I’m confused by it. Fx3 will add a folder to your bookmarks toolbar called “Places,” which is actually full of predefined searches – Recently Starred Pages, Recently Visited Starred Pages, Most Visited Starred Pages, Recently Used Tags, Most Used Tags and Most Visited Pages. Now you are probably starting to see what the Places system can do.

“Starred” pages are actually bookmarks. Why they have two different terms for the same thing I do not know. Adding bookmarks is a snap, next to the Go button is a new Star button. Click it once, and it’s bookmarked. But it doesn’t appear anywhere, except for those “Recently Starred” folders in your Places folder and it gets a little star in the new autocomplete (more on that soon). To get it to appear somewhere in your bookmarks, you have to click the Star again (no this button doesn’t toggle) and change its location from All Bookmarks to Bookmarks Menu. People may remember I hated this with Safari, and I’m hating it now. When I Bookmark stuff I expect it to be under Bookmarks!

While you are editing the “Starred” Bookmark (?) you can add tags. Another UI gripe here, it doesn’t indicate how to enter tags. Separate with space, semi-colons or commas? I first tried with spaces and then realised that it was just making one long tag, so commas was the next choice and it worked. Hopefully they’ll fix this up by beta 2.

But why would you want to tag bookmarks? Well, there is this new autocomplete that puts the old one to shame. Don’t you hate it when you are trying to find that page on Wikipedia you went to again, and you have to start typing “en.wikipedia” to get anything? Well, now you can start typing “wikipedia”, or the name of the Wikipedia page you were after or, well, whatever was in the title or URL of the page, and if you have starred it, whatever tags you gave it. Finally, a smart autocomplete! Well, not that smart, there is a patch in the works to implement adaptive learning into the new autocomplete, so when you type stuff into it it learns what you wanted when you typed it. Cool stuff.

These are the biggest changes to Firefox 3, and I’m really liking it. Other changes include a new way to save your passwords. One thing I hate is if I’m unsure of a password, so I dismiss saving it and then if it works, I can’t be bothered logging out and logging in again. They’ve now replaced this dialog with a bar along the top of the page that hangs around for a while so you can tell it that you do want to save the password if it worked. The other new feature is resuming downloads between browser sessions – a much requested feature.