This afternoon I downloaded the Beta 3 version of Firefox 3 for my Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) notebook. One of the great things about Firefox 3 is that it uses Aqua, so the browser feels much more OS X friendly. On top of that, testing done by myself and others seems to suggest that Firefox 3 has a much smaller memory footprint. In fact, our impromptu testing showed that Firefox 3 used roughly half as much memory as the previous version.
I’m sure you can understand our disappointment, though, when we opened up Gmail and discovered this:
If it isn’t obvious, there is a line break after the labels in the subject portion of the message display. This seems to mainly effect messages with long subject lines, but there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to which short-subject messages were broken and which were not.
My first thought was that this was caused by my somewhat dainty 12″ PowerBook display. But further testing proved that didn’t really seem to matter. Only some of the problems were fixed by changing my browser size. I also did a little testing in Firefox 2 and discovered Gmail resizing flawlessly as I resized my browser.
Obviously, this is just broken behavior. Firefox 3 is still in Beta, and this is by no means a show-stopper. I’m sure it will be fixed by the time Firefox 3 goes live, but right now — it’s really annoying!
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February 14th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
I have been using FF3 for the past few hours. I’m not experiencing the same issue in Gmail that you are. BUT, one thing that is quite ooooogly, is the new Bookmark Library. Rearranging the Bookmarks in my bookmark bar was quite the harrowing experience.
Can’t wait for FF3 to come out of beta. Will it kill Camino?
February 15th, 2008 at 9:54 am
As one Digg user was kind enough to point out, this issue is listed in the Firefox 3 Beta 3 Release Notes as a known issue.
February 20th, 2008 at 1:53 am
bummer i still have the version 2 of FF. =(
March 10th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
[...] this version of Firefox 3 still does not fix the problem with Gmail (also known as bug 415252). That’s not a deal-breaker in a beta release, but the problem must [...]
June 13th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
[...] good and I think Firefox 3 is ready for prime-time. It’s been a few months since I started using Firefox 3, and I couldn’t be happier with it’s performance in terms of speed, memory footprint, [...]