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?

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under PC Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.