After staying away from the beta builds of Firefox 3 for as long as I could stand, this morning I installed Firefox 3 b3 RC in place of FF 2.0.0.12.  I managed to make all of my important add-ons work, notably Adblock Plus (which worked out of the box) and IE Tab which required loading the Nightly Build Tools to work.

My first impressions are that this seems to be a solid build, although in the limited time I have been running it I don’t see anything revolutionary.  Most of the changes are supposed to be under the hood, things like getting rid of the Famous Firefox memory leak, better Acid compliance etc.  Still to come is the theme to integrate with Vista, which I suppose will be in beta 4 due later this month.

Yesterday I made a real effort to try and use IE 7, I installed IE7 Pro and used its adblocker program.  There is no comparison.  With IE7 Pro installed IE7; seems to me slower to render pages than Firefox and the ad-blocking capabilities of Adblocker Plus put everything else on the market to shame.  You should be using Firefox for Adblocker Plus if for no other reasons.  I was shocked to see what some sites looked like without ads blocked, they were nearly unreadable.

More on Firefox 3 as I dig deeper.