New Firefox Version: Nice New Features

I’ve been playing for a few days now on the new version of Firefox that just came out (version 3.0), and with it there are some new features I’ve been enjoying. Also, I’ve noticed the increased performance and smaller memory footprint that has been touted, in comparison to earlier versions.

Feature-wise, I like the new keyhole concept for moving backwards and forwards. An arrow on right, gives me quick access to the last pages I’ve viewed in that window or tab.

I like the quick bookmarking feature in the address bar too. One click on the star bookmarks the page and categorizes it as “unsorted.” Two clicks brings up the bookmark management dialogue box, and you can quickly file it wherever need be. No more having to go into the bookmark manager, find something you’ve bookmarked and then assign it.

There are also added capabilities for tagging your bookmarks, so you can quickly add a tag or choose from an existing one to more quickly find your tagged content later. Handy smart folders now pull up recent tags, recent bookmarks and most visited sites, making the bookmarking features in Firefox more in line with what social networking sites are doing. Great help for those who are used to relying on the bookmarking within the browser. However, most savvy users who are adept at using these types of features have probably moved their regular bookmarking over to Delicious, Digg or other social bookmarking site. Not sure if this would be enough to bring them back to using Firefox bookmarks.

Another improvement in the browsing controls is the ability to start typing into the address box any term that may be in a URL or title of a page you’ve visited. Firefox will quickly bring back in a drop-down any matches from your browsing history. This is a nice time-saving feature for when you can’t quite remember a full URL, but may know part of it or part of a page title.

A smart change in password management is that Firefox waits until after you’ve logged in now to ask if you want it to save your password. This is helpful to those of us who often “fat finger” a password and inadvertently tell Firefox to remember a wrong password.

One small feature that is great for us web developers is the ability to choose what you’re zooming. View > Zoom has an option to zoom only text (by default you’re zooming the whole page just like IE now). This empowers the user more to customize their preferred browsing experience per their display and tastes.

Another nice one is the File > Send Link feature. This feature spawns an email in your default email application, which can be a client on your machine or a web based application! For instance I was able to define Yahoo Mail as my default email app and have Firefox spawn a new email in clicking this feature. In Outlook, it also pre-populated the subject line with the pages title and the body with the link. A great idea, as there is no reason that users should have to rely on Web developers to continually build this feature into sites (Email this Page). It makes so much sense for the browser to have this capability built in – just like the ability to create a print version.

Security features which I have yet had the chance to explore much are also a step forward. Firefox can deliver one-click information about the site you are on now when you click in the icon. It also warns you more noticeably when security certificates don’t match and when you land on a suspicious malware and phishing sites.

Finally, a major new feature with Firefox is its ability to run Web applications offline. As I haven’t seen a demo yet or found confirmation in other reviews, I’m not sure yet if it can also synch back up when the user reconnects online. Likely, this is the direction Mozilla is going with this – similar to Adobe Air.

So what’s missing?

I was surprised that there isn’t mouse gesturing built into the browser. This has been available for awhile as an add-on, but I would have thought that Mozilla would have folded it into the core browser. Still waiting for the mouse gesture add-on to be updated to work with the new version so I can have this time saving feature back.

Also auto form completion. At this point, I would like to be able to store the basics in my profile (name, address, email) and have the browser complete a form for me with one click. There are add-ons to do this, but this feels like a feature I want as part of the core – like remembering passwords.

Finally, I was kind of expecting Firefox to do more with RSS support. The Live Bookmarks are workable but I find managing them to be somewhat clumsy. Perhaps the thinking is that advanced users will continue migrating towards web-based aggregators like NetVibes, BlogLines or Google Reader, and that working more on the browsers ability to handle these is not time well spent. I guess there are always add-ons to take care of this one as well.

All in all I like the new Firefox. I’m also looking forward to how the final version of IE 8 and Apple’s next version of Safari stack up.

To download a copy of Firefox version 3.0 visit: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/