Gran Paradiso
Friday, June 1st, 2007I’m writing this from the Alpha 4 version of ‘Gran Paradiso’, the traditionally pretentious codename for the next version of Firefox. Now, before downloading you are presented with the usual warnings, a whole pile of legalese which amounts to ‘if you use this software then you will definitely be eaten by rabid squirrels’. They even went to the trouble of posting download links to files that don’t exist, so that you have to hunt through the FTP server to download the thing.
I have to say though, on initial inspection I’m very impressed. It is lightning quick compared to Firefox 2. I haven’t noticed this much of a speed difference between browsers since I switched from IE6 to Firebird 0.4 way back when. That may of course be because all but one of my extensions (Adblock Plus is the black sheep) only work with version 2.x of Firefox - maybe I won’t bother reinstalling as many when Firefox 3 gets its final release (or when these evil weevil bugs catch up with me and I go back to Firefox 2?). Anyway, if this is the future of Firefox, roll on the future!
EDIT: Well that didn’t take long. All working fine until the CSS styling on PvXWiki didn’t work, and then two sites (one of which was Guild Wars Guru Auction) just wouldn’t load at all. Still, once they get minor bugs like refusing to load webpages sorted out, those speed increases will be brilliant 