I’ve read a lot of articles lately about the Firefox 3 Beta released last month, and most point out the 2 or 3 obvious features that will be coming – like Malware Protection, Web Forgery Protection, and Resumeable Downloading. The first thing that came to my mind was – “that’s it?!”. Going from a major revision like 2 to 3, I knew that there just had to be more exciting features than that! So I give to you –
“The Smorgasbord list of Top 10 New Firefox 3 Features“!!
- One Click Site Info: Just click the little favicon pic next to the URL in the address bar and see who owns the site — cool!
- Easier Password Management: Thank god! It’s time to have more than the basic options we’ve had for years. The “dialog” box will be replaced by an info bar.
- New Download Manager: I’ve been using Firefox for years and I’m really used to it saving everything to the desktop. But I always wondered when they would be making this a bit better. Looks like I’ll get my wish!
- Tab Scrolling and Quickmenu: I always thought that if I had 3 dozen tabs open the layout could be managed better than a “forever” scroll to the right. A ‘quickmenu’ allowing me to ‘go to end’ or jump quickly would be great. Depending on what will be on this menu – I’m thinking that this will be good for me!
- Full Page Zoom: I have always lauded the ability to zoom way in and out in a PDF – and now we will finally have that ability in a browser!
- Improved bookmarks: Some great things here, like one-click bookmarking, you can “tag” your bookmarks to categorize them (vastly improved from “folders”), and a ‘smart places folder’ with your recent bookmarks and tagged pages
- Location bar auto-complete: I will frequently type in the first few letters of a domain in the address bar to let it complete and quickly go to a site. But NOW, you can type either the first few letters of the web page name, or even the ‘tags’ you used when bookmarking the page. I think that this will prompt people to bookmark a lot more pages just to use this feature. Bookmark your online banking and tag it so you can just type “bank” in the address bar when you want to go to it, very handy!
- Reliability: This is a behind the scenes one, but if your system of browser crashes, your bookmarks, cookies, preferences, and history is stored in a transactionally secure database format preventing data loss. What does this mean? No more corrupted config files!
- Web Forgery Protection: Yes, this was already mentioned in other places, but I need to state why it’s cool. Email programs started long ago not displaying images until you click to “load” them because of spammers and phishers using them to entice you to click. Now, forged web pages will do the same and not display content to you – keeping people from being fooled. An awesome feature, you can test it here.
- Malware Protection: Also already mentioned, but I think this feature will be good because it will keep many people from adding third party plugins and what-not for malware into their browser. I know, it’s not perfect keeping a “blacklist” constantly updated with “bad” web sites, but at least it’s a start – and we can build from there. You can also test this one here
After looking at this list – I think that what is coming in the new Firefox 3 is really something to look forward to!! Now I just have to install it on one of my PC’s to personally test the beta. Have you been testing it? What do you think? Comment now below!
