Firefox 3 - Spectacular But Hasty Release
Firefox 3 was released last Tuesday with over 15 million downloads registered by mid-day yesterday. The much anticipated release of the open source browser represents the efforts of thousands of developers worldwide over the past three years under the banner of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. Ground breaking innovations include vastly improved performance with the new Gecko 1.9 platform that brings malware protection, reduced memory usage and customization that personalizes the browser in a truly unique fashion. In it’s current release it is a bit sensitive but not so much that it should deter anyone from exploring it’s benefits.
The Firefox 3 smart location bar actually accumulates usage data and anticipates where you may be heading, in case you forgot the exact URL, adding a list of places you have visited as well as it’s own algorithms that include dictionary output or searches if what you type doesn’t appear to be a valid URL. Bookmarking, tagging and searching are all more usable with actions recorded to fit the users experience and allow users to easily research and retrieve past efforts. If you prefer to limit the assistance provided by Firefox you can deactivate or customize some features.
In addition to the smart location bar, other innovations include One-Click Bookmarking, Instant Website ID, Full Zoom, Password Manager and Platform Native Look and Feel. This last feature provides a consistent look and feel with your operating system. Details can be found at the Firefox 3 Features page.
Many of the add-ons have also stepped up to match the innovation of this version that includes something in the neighborhood of 15,000 improvements. The Firefox site includes a list of recomended add-ons, some of which we haven’t tried but are anxious to do so:
- WebMail Notifier - keeps you informed about webmail including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo!
- Sage-Too - patches and improvements to the Sage project.
- Password Exporter - allows you to transfer saved passwords.
- Companion for Ebay - buy and sell assistance [Windows Only].
- Better Gmail 2 - added features and skins for Gmail.
- Feed Sidebar - display Live Bookmarks in the sidebar.
- Interclue - preview to links and more to numerous to mention here.
- [ more at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/recommended ]
You will find that many of the add-ons have redundant features and will have to decide which ones are best for you. We listed our favorites back in March and were glad to see those we depend on have been updated along with this version of Firefox. And now they all load and perform faster than in version 2.
The only glitch we came across is that it fails to shut down properly at times giving a notice the next time you open the browser that an instance is still running. But after doing so it will clean up that last instance and open a new one. I’m more than certain someone on the Mozilla team has undertaken a patch and will clean this up.
