The Mozilla Group posted Firefox 3 beta 5 on Wednesday. The latest beta tweaks the look and feel for all OSes, improves the location bar autocomplete, and makes minor improvements in security, stability and speed. However, Mac users should note some serious bugs remain and could cause problems.
Over 750 bug fixes and changes were cited. Improvements include:
- Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
- Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability.
- Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.
There remains a host of bugs and remaining issues, some very serious, cited in the release notes that affect all systems. In particular, Mac users should note two additional issues:
- Customizing toolbars will only work once per session (bug 426380)
- Saving a web page as PDF or Postscript will cause Firefox to crash the next time it is closed (bug 425585)
As a result, this beta should be used for testing purposes only, according to the Mozilla Group.