Firefox 3 Betas
I have been along time Firefox user (even since the early days when it was called Firebird) swearing by it and setting it as my families default browser! The Firefox 3 beta’s have been around for some months now and I have been using the beta since January, overall its been very stable and allot faster than previous versions (especially on my Mac). Some of the notable improvements that I have been using are:
- Location bar allows you to search through your history as well as bookmarks and most often visited sites (see screen shot below)
- Improved bookmarks, smart bookmarks and a bookmark manager which supports tagging
- Customised skins based around what ever operating system you are using it on (Windows, Mac, Linux etc)
- Improved download manager
- Faster page rendering and improved memory management
The main feature which is very impressive is the smarter location bar that allows you to quickly access most often visited sites and bookmarks, I don’t think I could go back to Firefox 2 as I would be lost without it!
The only niggles that I have had with it so far is the Home and End buttons on my keyboard seem to be acting as Page Up/Down buttons on my Mac, which is kinda pointless having 2 sets of buttons that do the same thing, but luckily someone has fixed it (if only it would make it into the final version, rather than being a hack!) and the Foxmarks plug-in has only just been upgraded to support Firefox 3 (which synchronizes your bookmarks between computers).
Whats even better for me as a Web/PHP Developer, is that it fully supports ACID2 which insures that Firefox is standards compliant and will hopefully mean that it will be allot easier to make the design of a website look pretty much identical between other ACID2 compliant browsers (such as Opera, Safari and even the IE8 beta). Now all they need to do is make it ACID3 compliant!
On another note I updated WordPress (which powers this blog) to 2.5, which has under gone a revamped admin interface and its surprisingly painless to upgrade as all your custom themes and uploads are stored in a separate folder and I haven’t had to touch my custom template/theme since I installed it a few years back.
