What I Like Most About Firefox 3

June 30th, 2008

What I Like Most About Firefox 3

1 comments

Firefox You probably know that Mozilla has finally released version 3.0 of the great Firefox browser. The latest version contains several enhancements, fixes and new features. But I just want to mention what I find really useful and like most.

Firefox is now dramatically faster and more stable than version 2. May be this is a result of being based on the Gecko 1.9 rendering platform. It rarely crashes now.
Firefox is now integrated with the operating system (Windows/Mac/Linux) and uses native libraries to be more stable and look like a native application.
The "Resume Download" button now works if you lost your conection and even if you restarted Firefox
The page zooming, rather than just text zooming, is now implemented after it was first introduced in Opera and Internet Explorer 7. My favorite feature is that Firefox will remember your zooming settings whenever you visit any page of the same site later.
Now you can select make multiple text selections using the Ctrl key. This saves me a lot of time.
Adding a new bookmark is now easier using the new star button on the right of the location bar. You can even associate tags with your bookmarks to organize them. The all new feature is that Firefox uses a Sqlite databse to store all the bookmarks with their tags.
The location bar now searches in your history and even in the bookmarked pages and sort the results according to your visits frequency.
Fullscreen mode (F11) now saves about 100% of the space to focus on the page. This helps me a lot when testing a new design or reading a long article.
One of my favorites is the new "Save and Quit" option that saves the open tabs for the next visit. What makes it different from restoring a session is that it saves the content not just the address. So you still can revisit all the pages even if you don't have an internet connection in the next visit. That's wounderful especially when you find it open on an error on the application you are developing to remember what bug you were fixing :)
"Save Password" message now appears only after you successfully login as a simple bar at the top
Finally, funny messages. When you type "about:config" in the location bar to edit the browser configuration, you get a warning message with a button that says "I'll be carefull, I promise!"