I decided to upgrade to Firefox 3 beta on the tablet, in part because I was looking for more memory performance improvements and also because I’m about to reinstall the laptop anyway.

Things are mostly the same. I haven’t had any crashes yet. It add some new internal functionality that’s pretty cool. By default, it asks you if you want to keep the tabs/open pages when you close a window. There have been plugins for this in the past, but it’s nice to see it in the core. (And having the option of deciding to keep them, or discarding them. You can specify to always do one or the other.)

It also has a nice feature where it remembers if you’ve resized text sizes on sites regardless of tab or window. This means that if I bump up the size in a Wikipedia page (so I can read it comfortably from the couch — ctrl-0, ctrl-dash and ctrl-equals are my friends,) and I open a link to something else in Wikipedia in another tab, it uses the sizing from the previous tab. Nice touch.

If a page prompts you for a password, it asks if you want to remember/not-remember/ignore in a bar at the top of the page instead of in a pop-up. That nice because it loads the next page without waiting for you to answer about the password. It’s easier to ignore if you don’t want to use the password management features.

On the downside, many of my plugins are not FF3 compatible and I find myself really missing mouse gestures and a few other things I’ve just incorporated into my daily browsing. I’m also really annoyed to discover it still searches for plugin updates on startup, and fails to start the browser until you acknowledge pending updates. I wish it would check for updates after loading…. I hate starting the browser and not actually having it start (and then hunting through the open windows for the dialog box just because WeatherFox or DownThemAll has a new update.) If I start a browser, I want a browser.

All for now.

Edited, for Marc.