Firefox 3.0, a few more notes

The minimum requirements for the installed version of Firefox 3 have changed.

For Windows: Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista

(no more support of Windows98 or ME)

Minimum Hardware per Mozilla.org

Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
52 MB hard drive space

For Mac: Mac OS X 10.4 and later

Minimum Hardware per Mozilla.org
Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
128 MB RAM (Recommended: 256 MB RAM or greater)
200 MB hard drive space

For Linux: these may vary for custom distributions

Linux kernel 2.2.14 or higher with the following libraries or packages:

glibc 2.3.2 or higher, XFree86-3.3.6 or higher, gtk+2.0 or higher, fontconfig (also known as xft), libstdc++5
Minimum Hardware
Intel Pentium II or AMD K6-III+ 233 MHz CPU (Recommended: 500MHz or greater)
64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
52 MB hard drive space

I always consider "minimum requirements" to be numbers only 50% likely to crash a machine. They can work ... they may work if you go off and do other things

between each command or click. Expect to use more machine for realistic performance.

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A few more observations:

The intelligent site-selection feature (Firefox looks at sites you've visited that match what you are begininng to type in the address bar, like the IE history) is ok, but I rarely rely on these. Because the fonts are a bit bigger than IE's it may be easier for people with visual difficulties.
To survey-takers -- Many sites required IE for most, if not all surveys. Even those that began accepting Firefox 2 may not have tested Firefox 3 enough to assure a good experience.
Some website forms may have issues. I've published to gather.com several times now with no problems, but I did have issues on a couple of blogs.
May web developers test for the browser being used to ensure compatability with special features on the site. Not everyone will have updated their pages yet.
Security (https) sites like banks or online order sites in V2 changed to yellow in the address bar. In V3, thus far, they remain white. This isn't a big deal, as I know where I am going and watch other icon indicators on the side, but it feels like a security feature is "missing". I expect someone will write a plug-in that addresses this if Mozilla doesn't fix it quickly.
The ThumbDrive (portable) version seems to run as well as, or faster than Firefox 2 on the machines I've tried thus far.

I'm not one to dive into new products the first few days on a production machine. Depending on the developer, I may wait months or skip versions if I feel my beta machines are shaky. While waiting a bit doesn't usually hurt, Firefox 3 has been on my Windows and Linux production machines now for 2 days and I've updated a couple clients who are predominently Firefox users. I am not familiar enough with optimal browser performance on MACs to give an opinion for that platform.

In summary: Firefox 3 is going to be a good addition to the browser arsenal.

Part 1 of this series
Part 2 of this series