Five things I love about Firefox 3

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If you are feeling early-adopter-y, you can hop over to mozilla.org and download the new Firefox 3 Beta build. It’s faster, slicker, and has OMG HOT new UI tools that should make your day better.

Five Things I love about Firefox 3:

  1. Because this is a beta version, most of my extensions and themes don’t work in F3…and I don’t miss ’em. I’ve been using it all day and haven’t had a single withdrawal symptom.
  2. Fast. Hella fast. Hecka fast. So damn fast. The memory management of Firefox 3 is slick. It caches less, stores image data more efficiently, and plugs memory leaks from extensions before they happen. This all comes from of the kind of nerdy nerdy attention to detail that was a feature of pre-Moore’s law programming, when bits were carefully placed like bricks in an arch. Hooray for OCD programming!
  3. Oh Bookmarks! Ye annoy me less! You are now a one-click thing on the navigation bar, with a cute star icon instead of a time-eating top menu monster.
  4. Full Page Zoom. If you don’t like squinting, download this browser. Hitting Ctrl + makes EVERYTHING get bigger, including images. This feature eliminates the “Big Text Stomps Nice Layout” problem we saw in earlier versions.
  5. Tab quickmenu. Stop worrying about all those tabs stacking up in your window. You can get at them from a dropdown in the corner. No fuss. There’s more room for page titles too, so you don’t have to find the tab you want using only the first ten characters.

4 Replies to “Five things I love about Firefox 3”

  1. I couldn’t find the tab quickmenu because I had the Showcase add-on installed – if you disable showcase then in the same spot is a similar ‘down arrow’ button but rather than showing mini-screenshots of every tab like showcase, it just lists all their titles.
    I have disabled showcase now because I find it’s quicker and easier to just look down the list of titles.
    :-)

  2. Firefox 3 may not work with your cms…

    please keep in mind that Firefox 3 is still beta, so, no, it’s not your cms’s fault. (Firefox 2 didn’t work so well with it when it was in beta, either)

    I have yet to try it. because I use virtually every computer I use with my cms at some point. and apparently you can’t log in at all with Firefox 3… or so the multiple people contacting the helpdesk wondering why it doesn’t work have told me…

  3. On the rare occasions that I use the dust-collecting-XP box behind me I use FF3 and have been since the first RC build.

    1) The reason I haven’t put it on my normal machine (a CentOS Linux box) is that, unlike Erica, I found I could not go about my day-to-day without my extensions. Well, at least I couldn’t do it without Chris Pederick’s awesome WebDeveloper and AdBlock Plus.

    2) Sing it sister. The speed improvements of FF3 are noticeable even to novices. Nicely done, Team Mozilla!

    3) I’m not liking the new bookmark stuff yet but the problem with that likely lies with me rather than with FF3. I can get a bit set in my ways where click-paths are concerned.

    4) Ooooh! I haven’t played with the full-page zoom yet but I’ll definitely be doing that the next time the XP box is booted.

    5) The tab quick menu isn’t new, IIRC. At least I see it here on my FF2. Perhaps there are usability changes which have brought it to your attention? Or maybe I have some obscure extension installed here which has given me the quick menu for all this time.

    IIRC, FF3 will be out of beta and released to the world real soon now. Those who aren’t inclined to adopt early won’t have to wait long to get their hands on a seriously improved web browser.

    Now if only they’d finally become 100% ACID compliant…

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