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Review of some changes in Firefox 3

Firefox Beta 3 has been released some days ago, I have installed it and made a little comparison with Firefox 2.0 to see some of the changes.

Here I am comparing them with screen shots, side by side when that is possible, because there are some features in 3 that are not present in 2.

Zooming

When you zoom with firefox 2 you can only zoom the text and not the images, but now with Firefox 3 the images are also zoomed, so you can zoom a page with text and images, or only images pages.

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 2

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 3

Bookmarking

One of the biggest changes on Firefox 3 is the way it manage bookmarks, and its interface also changed.

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 2

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 3

Check out that now, it s possible to use tags, what I have tried was to import my delicious directly to Firefox, to my concern tags were not imported, maybe a mistake considering how many people are using delicious out there.

By the way, and talking about delicious there is not yet a plugin for it, by the time I am writing this post, there is one for stumbleupon just released yesterday.

Other changes to bookmarking includes the stars, now as soon as you start typing the address you want to visit and when the visited (suggested) URIs appear you can easily check which one is already on your bookmarks, because of the star near to the URI.

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 3

And once you are visiting a page, if you do not want to use the shortcut Ctrl+D, you can just click on the star near to the URI, and a dialog box will be displayed so you can easily add that page to your bookmarks.

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 3

Places

This is something new in Firefox 3, that does not even exist in Firefox 2, it is a menu located upper left and as you can see, it helps you navigate in your "favorite" pages, the most visited, the most used tags, the recently visited, etc.

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 3

Password remembering

The dialog box offering to remember your passwords now appears located in other position it certainly looks better, but I do miss the "not now" option, don't you?

Update: Thanks for all of you that made me find it (sorry)

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 3

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 2

Add-ons

The add-ons dialog box (Tools-Add-ons) now has another option, which is Plugins, where you can manage the plugins installed on your Firefox, really a good addition.

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 3

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 2

Page Info

The page info dialog box (Tools->Page Info, or Ctrl+I) now has a real good option which is RSS discover, so you can easily find the rss links on the page to subscribe to it.

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 3

Firefox 3 screenshot Firefox 2

Update: To avoid the Digg Effect I had to disable the post of comments, and enable the cache of Drupal, thank you for your understanding, and sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your visit

Share/Save
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Since moving to Firefox 3, I have been imporessed with aspects of the new desin. Hwever, fundamentally, a browser needs to browse and Firefox 3 takes forever to load, oftern (OFTEN) does not load pages or is extremely slow (think one minute PLUS when a check with Safari, Opera, Netscape all result in instantaneous response).

I have reinstalled Firefox 2, because I love Firefox However, I now find that my Foxmarks synchronization does not include any bookmark added after the Firefox 3 installation. Worse, I have not found any version of the Foxmarks compatible with Firefox 2, only the new Xmarks that is compatible with the disappointing Firefox 3.

I'll take this weekend to see what I can find...then...like many others who are experiencingthis problem...I'll move on toward a reliable tool.

 
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i like this post

 
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The New firefox 3 is amazing. so clean and fast. I love it.

 
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I love firefox 3 thank you for sharing your information!

 
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Thanks for sharing. I'm definitely going to bookmark you

 
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Fire fox is a very good programm, these new changes bring some really good stuff. I hope other changes in futur will be like theses.

 
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I was always a IE sort of person. i tried out this beta a version along with a couple of my friends..still have it to this day. Love it!

 
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Wow that is great and interesting.

Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to make great posts like this one.

Bookmarked.

 
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Thank you very much for your feedback...

 
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I __HATE___ the so called Awesome Bar. I even switched back to firefox 2 for that reason. This is a lose of space: Title and website url are on 2 different lines. But hey, it is completion, so I am trying to find in my history someting I already know what it is about. So the TITLE is USELESS.
The switch to a better browser is to enhance my productivity. Today, I lose half a day parsing and editing about:config only to find they remove the ability to go back to old toolbar (with .richResults=false).

 
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I don't like Firefox 3. To be honest, I started out with Firefox 2, and the interface was fine and I like it. Now the back arrow is huge, the icons are hideous, and it doesn't even let you rename the bookmark toolbar folder which is just there bugging the hell out of me. I hate the new address bar with the drop down of bookmarks. I find it extremely useless.

 
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It is clear, that Fx 3 will have something that Opera already has, but it is still nice that they try to be better.

I think that copying a good ideai is not thievry, but develops the whole internet community!

 
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Again on new zoom feature.

This is the same guy of the previous post blaming on the new way zoom works. More calmed down, after some research, I can say there is a "text-only zoom" menu option, so I blamed too early. However, I have to say the beta still feels beta, slower and more unstable than production version firefox 2, and in particular zoom takes a lot of time. It takes almost as long as a reload, which doesn't make any sense if "text-only zoom" is checked.

Anyway, the final version will probably be much better, and I'll keep using the zoom the way I want. Sorry for all the blaming...

 
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Hello there Garrido and thanks in advance for your review.

@anonymous New Zoom
You have an extension to FF3 wich is called NoSquint that zooms the entire page (imgs incl.) or just the text. (never knew about this ff3 new zoom since now). The width enlargement (making us to hor. scroll :( ) has more to do with how the page was done rather than with zooming or resizing. I don't get why more and more the web designers make the pages with everything so tiny for people to read..
I wish there was a way like in Opera to change "on the fly" the CSS of a page. In Opera there are like 10 CSS styles to use for a better page reading etc.
All in all to me the pros and cons make ff3 almost the same thing since there are some extensions that don't work with it. I still don't get the "stars" feature very much. For sometimes I starred a page thinking I was bookmarking it but someother day I couldn't find it in bookmarks. Anyone? Thanks in advance.
Cheers everyone

 
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Hi,

Thanks for sharing! your experience, the most of us, would have discovered the solution and just forget about the rest!

Guillermo Garron

 
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New zoom so much sucks!!

Zoom is by far the feature I use the most. Blame on 99% of the websites and their tiny little fonts! But firefox 2 was there to save my ass: ctrl+scroll and read comfortably. Now there is a limit on the zoom I can get.

Firefox developers, take note of this:
When I zoom a page and the width increases, I need horizontal scroll to read all content. Am I supposed to read line by line with a hand constantly scrolling horizontally?

With the previous zoom model, width is fixed and the problem does not arise.

I quit!! There is no way to disable this ****! Screw opera, screw explorer, screw firefox. Which is now the browser that zooms properly? Konqueror is downloading: wish me luck.

 
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View -> Zoom -> Zoom Text Only.
Uncheck.
... and breathe normally.

 
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I like most of the features. But, the address bar auto suggestion box is paining me. I'm missing the simple auto suggestion of FF2. Is there any way to enable it?

 
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Looks very interesting.
Thanks for sharing.

 
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I've been using FF3b3 on XP and OS X for a couple days, seems a lot more stable then FF2. It renders pages super fast too, I've done some comparisons between it and IE6&7. Its amazing how fast it is.

 
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Thank you very much for your feedback.

Guillermo Garron

 
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@Jkwic, you might have too many addons installed.
I have that problem too, tried to uninstall some plugins and FF works faster.

 
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ff3 loads and runs alot slower than IE for me! any ideas why?

 
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As many features and improvements Firefox 3 has, I want to see one fundamental change happen in Firefox:

Memory Management

As anyone knows, FF2 has an incredibly poor memory footprint, often consuming hundred's of megabytes for no apparent reason (Linux is better) and as many web developers will know, once you start to add the useful extension into Firefox it becomes sluggish to use and will often crash.

If Firefox can sort out it's fat belly I will definitely be taking a look at it again.

 
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Memory management in FF 3 beta 2 is already much better than in FF 2. At least, on Windows Vista, which is what I'm using.

 
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Thanks for the review. Now, i'm a bit disappointed by Firefox3 features, since most of them already exist on Opera.

Zooming -> What? Firefox 2 don't resize images??? Opera already do this for ages.

Bookmarking -> All what Firefox3 pelople did was to copy the "Manage Bookmarks" feature from Opera.

I know that Opera have some issues. For example the embedded movies don't play well sometimes, but Firefox people should have done better. Opera contitues the fastest browser. I guess we have to what for the stable release to see the true power of Firefox.

 
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"Zooming -> What? Firefox 2 don't resize images??? Opera already do this for ages."

That's why I almost never used Opera -- because it distorts images and makes me scroll horisontally when all I want is to increase font size. That's a design flaw, in my opinion. Thankfully, Firefox 3 is going to have the text zoom feature again (people are working on it).

 
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Yes you are right, I also use Opera a lot, specially with flash enabled sites, I performs better, but the bad thing is that I like Stumble, and del.icio.us and other extensions that Opera does not have.

I use them both for that reason, I even use Epiphany some times.

Guillermo Garron

 
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Regarding 'password remembering', can't you just click the cross and continue (as if you had clicked 'not now')?

Nice review. Thanks for sharing.

 
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Thanks to you and to all of you who take your time to read and comment here, I really appreciate your visit, and hope to see you here again.

Guillermo Garron

 
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Just to let you know, you can click the red x to choose "not now."

 
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the "not now" became the 'x'

;-)

 
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RE: The password bar missing the "not now" option - won't closing the bar with the red x accomplish the same thing?

 
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Nice comparison!

Though I fear learning to distinguish between an "extension" and a "plugin" will be a long, painful process for some of Firefox's less tech-savvy users.

 
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Yes you are right, they are extensions, but it will be great if you could explain the differences, please.

Guillermo Garron

 
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Most importantly FF3 is one more nail in the coffin of IE. Web developers who stick to validated standards based code like my new site http://www.banglebangle.co.uk/ can be confident that their sites won't fall over or display poorly because Microsoft deliberately ignore internationally accepted standards.

Viva la FF3!!!

 
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[...]Comparativa completa sobre las nuevas funciones que hay en la futura version del ya archiconocido navegador .En esta "review" se muestran imagenes donde se pueden ver las considerables mejoras de la interfaz , asi como el aspecto de las páginas. ¡ Ansiosos por la version final ![...]

 
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Odd. Comments didn't show up until I submitted my own. Judging by the number of posts saying the same thing, I wonder if it's doing the same to everyone.

 
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In the remember password dialogue, the red X box takes the place of "Not Now" button. If you click it, it closes the drop bar with no action taken.

 
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"but I do miss the "not now" option, don't you?"

Just hit the x beside it. It's the same thing.

 
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Thank you for this detailed comparison!

In response to your missing the "Not Now" option in the new Firefox, the reason that button no longer exists is because you have the "X" to close out the entire dialog. It's the same as hitting the "Not Now" from earlier versions of Firefox.

 
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Regarding password saving, I assume you can click the red X if you want the Not Now option.

 
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Well what I have read is that Firefox 3 is still trying to close the memory leaks and it does chew up a lot of the memory when running under the Windows environment.
I have not yet transitioned into firefox 3 but I wondered if there is a significance memory leak issue.

 
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"The dialog box offering to remember your passwords now appears located in other position it certainly looks better, but I do miss the "not now" option, don't you?"

What happens if you close or ignore the message? I've not installed ff3, but wouldn't clicking the "x" do the same thing as "not now"?

I just can't imagine they'd take that feature out.

 
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I like the new FF 3, but the memory leaks are terrible. It averages around 75,000K on my Windows XP machine, and 400,000+ is not unusual. Hopefully they fix these issues...

 
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Try using Firefox Ultimate Optimizer- Gets the footprint down to between 500 and 4k, and leaves a 1k footprint of its own- Very nice!

 
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I love the way the background page of the screenshots is "How to become a Digg Power user in only 48 hours"

 
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The only gripe I have with any firefox version is that it remembers log in passwords for a short time, then they vanish. This is a must fix feature, especially for us web designers!!

 
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I've never had this problem. Just be sure to uncheck "remembered passwords" etc if you manually use the "clear now" button.

 

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