Firefox 3: Make the switch or wait ?

The Mozilla Firefox team did release Beta 2 of Firefox 3 just two days ago and with each passing Beta I’m asking myself if I should make the switch to Firefox 3, wait or use both versions next to each other. Most extensions do not work right out of the box though which is probably the greatest concern besides that this is still a Beta and not a release candidate or the full version.

Firefox 3 will be an awesome browser. The developers managed to get rid of some of the memory problems that seem to plague Firefox 2 users and incorporates several beloved extensions into the main product. The release notes are a bit sparse on the changes in Beta 2 compared to Beta 1, here is what they say:

Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

My personal suggestion is to either install and use both browsers for a set period of time before you make the switch to Firefox 3 or wait until the first release candidate gets posted on the Mozilla website. I had good results using the portable version of Firefox 3 next to Firefox 2 which ensures that both browsers do not share the same profile.

You could create a new profile for Firefox 3 as well and make sure that this one is used whenever Firefox 3 is started while the default profile is used when starting Firefox 2.

Most extensions work flawlessly if you use the Nightly Tester Tools which fix extension compatibility in Firefox 3.