Information Addicts

Over 20 million people (and still growing) have downloaded Firefox 3 (FF3), but plagued with problems such as random crashes, incompatibility issues, and other intermittent faults is making users wonder if upgrading was a good idea.

What are the benefits of upgrading to FF3?
Do you know any of the new features Mozilla have incorporated into the browser?
After speaking to users at work and friends, most can’t even tell the difference, other than having some annoying problems.

I played it safe and have been testing FF3 for a few weeks, but still use FF2 as my main browser.
What has really frustrated me with FF3 is that many of my essential add-ons are not compatible, and I have had to try and find alternatives.

I decided to find out just what is actually new in FF3, and to determine whether or not to continue using it. Listed below is my findings.

1. According to Mozilla, FF3 has been in development for the past 3 years, and had “15,000 changes to improve performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.”
15,000 changes, wow, that is some development, but where are the changes?

2. FF3 is claimed to be around 2.7 times faster that FF2. Mozilla state that “This is due to improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance, compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3.”
This is great news for many of us who use these applications.
Have you found it to be faster? I have but I don’t think it is twice as fast.

3. FF3 has less memory leaks, therefore uses less memory, leading to an increase in performance. This is good news if you found FF2 a bit on the slow side, especially when loading flash based videos. I have found FF3 loads flash videos almost instantly. If you haven’t tried watching flash videos, go to YouTube and click on a video just to see how fast it really is.

4. FF3 now stores your bookmarks, history, cookies and preferences in a secure database format which prevents loss to any of your data if the computer crashes. I think that should also include, if Firefox 3 crashes :).

5. Clicking on the site identity button, which is to the right of the web address bar, should enable you to see who owns the site and how secure it is, and in some instances the company address. Unfortunately most sites don’t give out this information and below is what you normally see.

If you click on the ‘More information’ button, FF3 does display a handy dialog box which allows you to see if the website is storing cookies on your computer, and if you have any passwords saved for that site. You can also block or allow images, cookies, pop up windows and much more, making this a very handy tool indeed.

6. Stronger phishing and malware protection; if you go to a web site that FF3 recognizes as having viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware you will get a warning message as shown below.

I am not sure how accurate this works, but if used with McAfee SiteAdvisor, is an excellent combination to keep you safe from online threats.

7. Firefox 3 now integrates with your anti virus software, and will inform your program when downloading executables.
Which hopefully means more secure downloads.

8. One feature I have always found handy in Firefox, is the ability to increase the text, as some web page fonts can be small and difficult to read. However if you increase the text to much, it does not always wrap around an image correctly and can make the page unreadable.
In FF3 you now have the option to scale the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Which ever settings you change, will be remembered whenever you return to that site. To increase the images as well as the text,  click on View > Zoom and then either tick or untick the option ‘Zoom Text Only’.

9. Improved download manager. In my article ” The 2 Free Greatest Download Managers on Earth,” I wrote about the best 2 freedownload managers on the internet. Although FF3 download manager is not as good as these free applications, they have improved it. You can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection. A search button has been incorporated so you can easily locate any of your downloads, and also search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and time remaining are shown in the status bar as your files download.
If you right click on any of your downloads you can go back to the download web page, pretty neat.

10. Bookmarks has been beefed up, and to bookmark a page simply click on the star icon in the address bar, and it will add the web page to the ‘Recently Bookmarked’ option which is under the Bookmarks menu. A second click lets you file and tag your web pages, with an option to associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
You can quickly view your most visited bookmarked websites, and also any that your have recently bookmarked, all within a few clicks of the mouse.
You can now install bookmark add ons which can add a multitude of features to your bookmarks.
Lastly, you can now backup or import your bookmarks with one click.

11. Firefox will now automatically check your add-ons, plugins, and disable any that are not compatible. I have also noticed that FF3 will not let you install any add-ons that are not compatible with it. Which will hopefully make your computer more secure and safer from attacks.

12. You can now easily resize the search bar by simply dragging it to the left or right. Handy if you actually want to see what you are typing in the box.

13. Smart Location bar or the Awesome bar. You will either love it or hate it, however, most people don’t know how to use it, and ignore its options, but let me explain how it works.
The Smart location bar is the box where you enter the web site address at the top.
If you type words in the address bar, (not website addresses), Firefox will start matching those words against your local history and bookmarks, with web pages that you have previously viewed or stored. The more bookmarks and history you have, the better and smarter the Awesome bar becomes.
However, if you don’t use bookmarks or you constantly clear your data after every session then the Smart Location bar will not be of much use.

14. Firefox 3 has a new graphics and text rendering architecture, which basically means that graphics and fonts in web pages are supposed to look better and smoother. I cannot really see any difference myself, can you?

There are many more new features in FF3, and for a more complete list click on ‘Whats New in Firefox‘. Also for a quick video of FF3 click here.

Going back to my original question ‘Is it Worth the Upgrade?’ After a few weeks of using FF3 and making a few tweaks here and there I think it is, and have used Firefox 2 less and less. Ok FF3 has still got bugs, but for me it has never crashed, and I am sure the guys at Mozilla will sort these problems out.

So which version do you prefer Firefox2 or 3?

Popularity: 16% [?]

Back in April (how time flies,) I wrote an article called ‘3 Smart Ways to Create More Desktop Space‘ and at the very bottom of the post I introduced an application called 360desktop. 

At the time of writing all I could show you was a video of 360desktop as it hadn’t even been released, but that was enough to get me hot under the collar.
Since that day I have been eager to get my hands on this application, and last Friday I received an email from the guys at 360desktop which invited me to download and try it.

I was at work when I got the email and couldn’t wait to get home to play around with it.
Once home I excitedly downloaded and installed 360desktop (which went straight forward,) and played around with it for a while.

So what exactly is 360desktop?

360desktop is like having a panoramic workspace which allows you to slide left or right through 360 degrees giving you extra screen space for all your open applications, windows and widgets. The image or picture that you see on your screen is basically several images stitched together and cleverly designed to spin in a complete circle.

The application is currently in beta mode, and to be honest I found it to be rather limited in what it can do, and like all beta programs is buggy. You only have a choice of 2 wallpapers and you cannot create anymore, apparently this option is to come. You can also add widgets, which are small applications that can give you extra functionality to your desktop, but I couldn’t get them to work. I found my applications opened up ok in 360desktop but when some of them were maximised in size, I couldn’t get 360desktop to scroll. There is also a program update button but when I clicked on it, I received an error message and was unable to connect to their server to check for the latest updates.
There are a few other options, for example, you can control the speed of the scrolling desktop, and panning sensitivity but thats about it.

Update: 360desktop have just released 3 new wallpapers, take a look.

Overall I was a bit disappointed with this application, sure it looks nice but functionality wise, it has very little to offer. But, and I feel there is a big but, I would certainly keep my eye on this program as I think it has great potential and may go far. When the guys at 360desktop add more features to it, and smooth out the bugs I will definitely be trying it again.

If you would like to take it for a spin :), and I recommend you do, then you can download it here. Please back up your system before you do download and install it.

Have you tried 360desktop, what do you think of it? Let me know in the comments box.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Millions of files are downloaded worldwide everyday over the internet, and many people use either Firefox or Internet Explorer to get the job done . But using these programs can be rather limiting, slow and tedious at times.
In my opinion there are 2 download managers that are miles ahead of the competition, and they are Free Download Manager and Orbit.
My personal favorite is Free Download Manager but alot of users like Orbit because it is simple to use and has many powerful features to boot.

Take a look below at some of the features of these great applications, download them, try them, and let me know which one you like best.

Free Download Manager
As I wrote before this is my all time favorite download manager, in terms of features there is very little that this software can’t do.
1. Free Download Manager is compatible with Firefox, Internet Explorer and various other browsers. It has many features and I recommend that you first read the helpful guide, to get started. Once you have learned the basics, which wont take long to learn the world is your oyster, well the internet is anyway :).

2. With FDM (Freedownloard Manager) you can easily download files, whole web sites from any remote server via HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and even using BitTorrent protocol.

3. One of the reasons I really like this application is the Flash Video Download option. Simply go to your favorite video website, whether it is YouTube, Google video etc, find the video you want to download, then go to FDM, click on the Flash Video Download tab, click on the Add download button (the round blue icon on the top right with the cross on it,) and FDM will automatically download the video file. But it doesn’t stop there. You can choose to save it in AVI, FLV, WMV, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 format, and even choose the bitrate (which will affect the quality of the video.) You can also preview the audio/video files before download is completed and convert the file format after download.

4. FDM can connect to the Internet at a scheduled time, download the files you want, and when its finished disconnect or shut down your computer.

5. FDM works in 3 different modes – depending on your usage you can set it to light, medium or heavy. By default, it is set to light mode which is ideal if you want to download some files, browse the internet and also use different applications all at the same time.

6. HTML Spider. This is a really handy tool if you want to download whole web pages, whole web sites, images from any website, or CSS files. It can also be adjusted to download files with specified extensions only.

7. Portable Mode, if you want to use Free Download Manager on different computers, you can easily create a portable version and avoid the need to install and configure the program on each computer.

8. The Opinions tab, before you download a file you can click to see if anyone else has downloaded that particular file, this enables you to know whether the file or download is malicious. If you have downloaded a file and know it is safe you can post your opinion to let everyone else know that it is safe to download.

I could go on and on about this application but to truly appreciate it you need to download it yourself and try it, after all it is free. Click here to download Free Download Manager.

Orbit.

1. Orbit download manager is not as sophisticated or feature rich as FDM, but never the less an excellent free download manager. It is compatible with Firefox, Internet Explorer and various other browsers.

2. Orbit supports HTTP/FTP/HTTPS/RTSP/MMS/RTMP protocols, which means you can download any files, music (including MP3,) images, videos (including .wmv,) from the likes of YouTube, Yahoo, Pandora, Myspace, etc.

3. Small and resourceful, when Orbit is downloading, it typically uses less than 3MB of memory and 3% of the cpu (central processing unit,) so it wont use up all your system resources and slow your pc down to a halt. Orbit is also only around 2MB in size, great news if you don’t have a large hard drive.

4. Orbit uses Extreme download acceleration therefore making downloading files extremely fast. This mainly depends on your Internet connection speed, and the program settings. However I found it to be pretty fast.

5. The Grap++ module will automatically detect any download links on the page, including audio, video, or flash files (FLV or SWF), you then have the option to download any, or all of the files with a click of a button. To use Grap++ you need to open it first before you open your web browser.

6. There is nothing more frustrating than downloading a large file for it to suddenly stop, which means you have to download it all over again. Orbit (and also FDM) can resume broken downloads. So you needn’t start the downloading process from the very beginning after casual interruption.

7. Automatically Detects and downloads flash video. If you hover your mouse over a flash video or flash file (FLV or SWF,) a small download button (which reads ‘GetIt’) will be displayed allowing you to instantly download the video. This is a really great idea, and if you don’t want to download the video just click on the cross to close the button.

8. This neat software application also comes with download scheduling which is useful if you have a lot of files to download and don’t have the time to download them all at once.

To download Orbit click here.

Overall, both of these free download managers have a lot to offer, if you like many features and options then Free Download Manager is the one to go for.

So which Free download manager do you like the best?

Popularity: 22% [?]