Yes, I have read about the IE tab. My thinking is anything that is emulating is at best perfect, but is more than likely not 100% accurate. So why not just use the original and get the true user experience when testing. IE is on the machine already. It is not something I have to add-on.

I picked up your remark about only using IE for visits to Microsoft.Com.

Did you know there’s a nice add-on for Firefox (2.x and 3.0) called IE Tab, which, in effect, turns the current FF tab into an instance of IE? It keeps all the FF menus and toolbars, including those from any other add-ons you have, but the page is rendered using the IE engine.

This is really handy for visiting Firefox-hostile sites (such as parts of MSDN, tesco.com, the BBC iPlayer, and others). It’s also good for testing your own pages in both browsers without having to fire up IE.

Just thought I’d mention it.

Mike Lewis
Edinburgh
http://www.ml-consult.co.uk

I’m a little late to the omcment party here but 2 very large and important differences for me has been that 3 is more stable and they appear to have killed any issues I had with memory leaks. FF 2 would slowly consume a large chunk of available system RAM, particularly when using various Google apps.

rk

I came across an article online a while back that explained how to create additional Firefox profiles, and setup custom shortcuts which allow you to run multiple versions of Firefox simultaneously without them mucking with each other’s settings. I installed FF3 at about beta 3, and have been working with v.3 ever since. Other than a couple of my favorite extensions not being updated, I can’t think of any problems I had with v.3. I used the Nightly Tester Tools extension to override the compatibility on a couple of my must-have add-ons, and that worked great. I replaced v.2 with v.3 a day or two after it was officially released, and it’s been working fine for me. It feels a little more polished, and I think it’s probably a little faster, so overall I would say it’s an improvement, but on the order of “nice”, rather than “wow”. Bottom line, I would tell people to go ahead and install it if they’re thinking of doing so, but there’s no need to hurry up and do so, and check if any critical add-on that you use has been updated first.

Like Vista and Visual FoxPro 9 SP2, the only way to really know how it affects my business is to try it myself. It is now #13 on my to-do list.

* Firefox 3 Missing Back Button
* Using AdBlock With Firefox 3