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New Firefox 3 Browser Offers More Features
By Reshma Kumar at May 27, 2008 2 Comments
Mozilla’s latest version of its popular Firefox browser, Firefox 3 (Release Candidate), is available for testing purposes only. So, in the ongoing browser wars between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (version 8 beta available), Apple’s Safari browser, the Opera browser, and Mozilla’s Firefox, who is winning? The Netscape Navigator browser died a slow death and eventually dropped out of the race leaving the others to duke it out. So, who is winning? No surprise, based on Q1 2008 data from Net Applications, IE leads the pack with a 75.06% global usage market share followed by 17.35% for Firefox, Safari at 5.78%, and Opera at 0.67%.
With Firefox 3, what exactly is new? What can we look forward to in the next generation web browser. Well, their site lists a laundry list of goodies but here are the magic 3 improvements.
1. More Ease of Use
- Full page zoom: with FF3, you will be able to zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or only the text size. And your settings will be saved whenever you return to the site.
- Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit. Love that!
- Text selection: multiple text selections, double-click drag selects in “word-by-word” mode, and triple-clicking selects a paragraph.
- Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
2. More Personalization
- Tags: ability to tag your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
- Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks.
3. More Security
- One-click site info: click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping.
- Malware Protection: malware protection warns you if navigate to a site known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware.
- New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown.
- New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate.
Labels: Apple, firefox 3.0, internet explorer, Microsoft, mozilla, msft, web browsers
2 Comments
“Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.” Bad idea, as bad as 2.0’s ridiculous feature of refusing to launch until you have specified whether you want to restore your previous session or start a new one. Dear Mozilla: Don’t bother me every time. Let me specify my preference once, then do it that way every time until I change it.
i completely disagree with “anonymous”. i think that restoring previous browsing sessions is one of the MOST IMPORTANT FEATURES in my everyday browsing. i can safely log out of my machine for security reasons, then come back to exactly where I was before it is a true time saver that allows me more efficiency in my workday.