Review of Firefox 3.0b4

Product: Mozilla Firefox
Website: http://getfirefox.com
Download URL: Firefox 3.0 Beta 4, (English US)
Category: Application

I had been longing to install and use the 3.0 version of my favorite web browser, Firefox, for quite some time. There was an internal addon (non-public) which supports only 2.0.0.x of Firefox right now, that was holding me from doing it. Last weekend, I decided to break the barrier and installed the latest offering, 3.0b4.

The installation was pretty smooth(on my Win XP laptop), and the new version picked my settings/bookmarks/passwords/history/etc from the previous installed version. Before launching, the application checked for the compatibility of my installed addons/themes with this new version. Though its fairly straight forward to make your extensions compatible with this new version, quite a few extenions are still not upgraded. This is one (temporary) bad news, that some of your favourite extensions (eg. Firebug) stop working with the newest version.

Anyhow, though there are a lot of new features and enhancements bundled into Firefox 3.0, I’ll try to cover the ones that I have come across as an end user of Firefox.


+1: The first thing that I noticed after launching the application was a compact new Back/Forward button.
I like the new compact and sleek design. These buttons re adjust when you switch to a full-screen view. Also, I like the idea of clubbing the list of items into a single dropdown. This is a lovely UI enhancement.

-1: The home button has been removed from the Navigator Bar. Its new location is in the Bookmarks Toolbar. For me this is bad, as I don’t use the bookmarks toolbar. I keep it hidden to make my firefox look sleek.




+1:
A “Smart Bookmarks” folder has been added to the Bookmarks toolbar, which lists
1) Most Visited Links
2) Recent Bookmars.


+1: History, now remembers and displays the recently closed tabs as well. So if I close multiple tabs and have to reopen the 3rd last tab that I closed, I would not have to open the two other tabs before I am able to open the desired tab.


Tools>Addons has two new tabs

+1: “Get Addons” is a tab in itself, rather than a link to AMO site. The search and install feature is very beautifully embedded.

+1: “Plugins” tab. Thanks so much for this feature. I now know what all is supported by my browser along with the app versions.

+1: Bookmarking a page is really easy now. As easy as starring an email in GMail

+1: Tools>Options has a new, very useful tab: “Applications”. Thanks again for this wonderful feature.

+1: Now I can save the username/password combination in Firefox even after confirming that the password is correct.

+1: I love the way tabs animate when you open more tabs than the current view can accomodate.

+1: Most importantly, I can still use my Firefox 2.0.0.x installation (though it wants to reclaim its kingdom and wants to be the default browser again, buts that ok.)

I am sure there are many more enhancements visible to the end user which I’ll add to the list as I come across.

I Think: FF3 is a great step. Keep up the good work.

I Dream: I get less crashes with this release.