My delight with Firefox 3

On Tuesday June 17th 2008 the world went crazy for the latest release of Firefox. Ok, not the whole (cyber) world, 8 million to be more exact (20 million within the first week), but those numbers probably felt like the world to Mozilla, the foundation that brings us what I am sure is going to become the world’s favourite web browser within the next 10 years. I have been a fan, dedicated user and strong advocate of Firefox since I started using it back in 2004. I can point to specific features that I love about it that keep me using it day-in, day-out, but generally I just love it for what it is: a quality, open-source, multi-platform compatible piece of software, slowly clawing its way into the lives of everyday Internet users, over-coming the massive virtual monopoly of Internet Explorer.

However, on June 17th I was not one of the 8 million users who downloaded the latest version. Indeed, I wasn’t even one of the first 20 million. Perhaps being primarily a Microsoft Windows user I have become accustomed to new software not working properly upon their immediate release, so I decided to wait for reports of the bugs to come in and emergency updates to be made. Well, with almost two weeks gone by, there have been very few issues reported, even those seem feeble and given that the first one reported also exists in Firefox 2, to me it sounded like someone just wanted to spoil the party by announcing “their discovery” on the day of the new release. So it was with a handful of excitement that I commenced the 7MB download and installed version 3 this morning.

On the face of it (in my opinion), the visible changes are not in-your-face, certainly nothing so different it will take weeks of coming-to-terms with. With Firefox 1 there was a single button for closing the active tab situated on the right of the window, but Firefox 2 introduced us to tab specific close buttons. I recall it was a change that took me several weeks to get used to and to begin with I wasn’t even sure if I liked it! Of course, now I am completely comfortable with it and can’t imagine ever going back to a single, common, active tab only button for closing.

Aside from the new default theme of Firefox 3, probably one of the first new features you will notice is the “awesome bar”. The awesome bar is essentially the address bar, but now rather than just allowing you to type in website addresses, you can also type in words that appear in both website addresses and page titles of sites you have visited and they will be displayed in order of most visited first for you to easily select and go to.

This is super handy if you sometimes can’t remember how a website address starts (perhaps because the owner decided to get creative) but can remember the name or a few words about it.

If like me you spend a lot of time looking at photos, you might use your browser’s full screen mode. The Firefox 3 full screen mode really is full screen (hit F11 to activate/deactivate), with just a very thin glimpse of the navigation bar on show so that if you want it to reappear there is something to hover over to get it back.

For all of its good points, there was one aspect of Firefox 2 that really frustrated me and that was memory usage. Despite the huge number of extensions available to truly customise Firefox to your own liking, I only have a handful installed, yet after prolonged usage Firefox 2 could end up running like a drain. Also, particular aspects of certain sites regularly didn’t work as smoothly as one would have liked, the facebook photo gallery springs to mind. I had to eventually resort to switching off JavaScript when browsing said gallery because when moving from picture to picture the window would temporarily freeze up, only to then suddenly come back to life. One of the first sites I tried out with Firefox 3 was facebook and in addition to the site generally working a lot faster, the gallery does not appear to suffer from the hang ups I experienced with version 2. What a relief!

I recently read that Firefox 3 is now the most memory efficient browser available, which is great news. This claim has been made by Sam Allen and although his testing was not what you might call strictly scientific, the guy wrote a piece of software to record his findings, which is good enough for me.

So to conclude, I am very happy with Firefox 3 and hope that all the recent publicity it has received pushes its market share even higher. The best feature in my mind of Firefox 3 is the memory handling improvement, but the awesome bar is very cool too. Firefox is all about the Internet and I believe leads the way in web browsing innovation, so why wait years for its benefits to filter through to Internet Explorer, when you can just install it now and be part of the revolution!?

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