Mon 12 Nov 2007
Firefox 3.0 Preview
Posted by Bashar under Browsers, Firefox, Technology
The clock is ticking for the Firefox 3.0 release and people are looking forward to it. I was afraid things are slowing down a bit at Mozilla after the huge market share Firefox gained, but this preview from LifeHacker gives me huge relief. A group of new features and enhancements are presented with screen shots (Don’t miss the screen shots!). The features that appealed to me are:
- Better Page Zooming: Not only text zooming, but images now change size accordingly as well. So you can browse normally by the zoom level you want.
- View Recent Content: This could be useful. It allows you to list most recently starred pages, visited starred pages, most used tags, most visited pages and more.
- Stars marks bookmarks: From the address bar, you will see a star nearby bookmarked URLs so that you don’t double bookmark it.
- Tags!: YES. Bookmark folder is not enough. So now, you can tag a bookmark with as many tags you want. A site could be both Financial site, and an Online Service for example.
- Default Applications and Download Actions: Now, not only you can specify which RSS Reader to use, but through the Applications Tab, for each file type you specify the action you want to do. Be it Save, Open with Adobe Reader, or Ask upon click. This could come real handy for frequen file types. For example, Save all ZIP Files and use Foxit Reader to open all PDF Files.
- Tweaked Notifications: Less annoying now, when you submit your username and password, you won’t get a pop-up asking to remember your information, but rather you get a header above the page asking if you want to make such action.
- Addon Management: FINALLY, you can request to Restart Firefox from Plugins tab, not only through Installation Tab when you have installed new plugin. It’s simple, but I always wanted it.
Don’t take my words for it, please take the time and go through the screen shots made available for you there. A side from all of that, I would be interested to see how their memory management behave. I still have to close my browse after a long busy day to free up memory.
Popularity: 38% [?]




November 12th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Offtopic: Something you may haven’t noticed: Gtalk in Gmail now works in Safari (Finally!) and you can import/export addresses :)
November 13th, 2007 at 5:20 am
3baid: Every time I talk about Firefox someone comes back with Safari news :)
No I don’t use Safari, but it’s not a bad browser. The higher ceiling of Firefox is superior. But, happy for you Apple fans! :>
November 13th, 2007 at 8:47 am
I’m the same as you, I have been wanting the restart and the tags are going to make things a lot easier for me! I have a lot of old bookmarks. I can’t wait for the improvements and hopefully one of them is that its lighter and faster!
November 13th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Marzouq: New bookmarks feature is neat, but I dont know if it will push me to use it. I replaced local bookmarks with Google Bookmarks sometime back.