Mozilla Firefox 3 Review

Posted on June 24, 2008 at 5:45 am

On June 17th 2008, Mozilla finally pulled Firefox 3 out of Beta, thus releasing what, in my opinion, is probably the best browser, ever.

I love Firefox. Let’s get that straight from the very start. Me and Firefox 2 got through a lot of rough times together, until Safari finally parted us, and became my browser of choice. After that I anxiously followed FF3’s journey, hoping it would take back what it rightfully owned; my “Default Internet Browser” slot. And it has.

What’s New:

Quite a bit, really. First off, the security. There have been more changes under the hood than I can possibly account for here. But let’s skip all those ugly details, and get to what really matters. FF3 is the safest browser out there. It conforms to just about any standard you could possibly throw at it. No surprise really, considering that FF2 was the safest browser when it launched.

The interface is surprisingly not very different. In fact, the only part that has undergone a quantum change is the Back/Forward Button area. This is what it now looks like.

Notice that the Back and Forward buttons are actually looped together with a single button being used to display your recent history. This works really well because you can navigate both forward and backward from a single list.

Next up is the much touted “Awesome Bar”. The Awesome Bar is actually a nickname for the much improved Address Bar which was given to it by beta testers. So what’s so Awesome about it?

The Awesome Bar works almost like Vista’s search feature. Lets say you’re looking at a page with the title “Tips and Tweaks”, and you accidentally close FF3. If you open it up again and type Tips and Tweaks into the Awesome Bar, it brings up the page you were looking at! This, is no doubt awesome. Its also adaptive, and records your preferences as you use FF3 more and more. Apart from this, what you typed is highlighted, making it easy to go through long lists.

In my opinion, the Awesome Bar is FF3’s best new feature, and the kind of thing that makes you wonder how you got along without it once you get used to it.

Something else your not going to find elsewhere is the new and improved Page Zoom. Not only does it increase the size of text, it also Zooms pictures. This makes for a much better “Zoomed” experience.

Despite all these features being added on, FF3 is a lot more memory efficient than any other browser out there. With just Google opened, FF3 consumed a meager 19MB of RAM, while Safari consumed close to 35MB.

I gave up FF2 for Safari for one primary reason, speed. I said in my Safari review that Safari ousted FF2 from the Speed throne. After using FF3 since its release, and after a lot of self-debate, I can honestly say this: the King is back. Firefox is once again the fastest browser out there.

Something I haven’t mentioned yet is that FF3 actually has a different interface for every platform. For instance, the above screenshots were taken on Vista, but on Mac OS X, FF3 would look like this:

Nifty huh? This was done to provide an interface that was as close as possible to the interface of the Operating System it was being used on.

The Library is a brand new feature that is a central location to handle all your history and bookmarks.

As you can see, It looks eerily like Windows Media Player 11 on Vista. You can even search through history using the search bar that’s been built in.

The Caveats

Everything has to have a flip-side. As does FF3. Thankfully, the flip-side itself is so small that its almost non-existent.

What irritated me the most about FF3 was the fact that it maintains the same font rendering as FF2. I actually prefer the darker, more prominent font rendering provided by Safari. But that’s just a matter of personal preference. Take a look at the image below to get what I’m driving at.

One other thing is that a few of your old Plugins may not work. But considering how important Plugins are to the Firefox experience, this is going to be remedied soon enough. Heck, a lot of the old Plugins already work with FF3.

Also, FF3 is not compatible with older OSes such as Windows 98 and ME, and Mac OSX 10.2.

Conclusion

FF3 is everything it promised to be. Faster, more Secure, and loaded with useful new features. There is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t at the very least give FF3 a try. You can download it here.

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Comments

8 Responses to “Mozilla Firefox 3 Review”

ben said on : June 25th, 2008 at 12:41 am

being an avid XP user who have not used Vista yet, the FF3 introduced me to the “Awesome Bar” – which is really awesome in my opinion. My only complaint with Firefox from version 1 to 3 is that eats too much memory – this page for example takes up more than 70Mb of my RAM! I don’t believe they need that much of RAM to cache and process this single page. It also took me more than 1 restart to be able to install it – something is wrong with the installer.

Still with those given hassles, FF is still the best browser for me. It’s clean and fast and allows for more great plugins like cooliris! Also if you are a web developer, its feature to show all errors and warnings of a website is a very handy utility (click Tools > Error Console).

bart said on : June 25th, 2008 at 6:06 am

I’m sorry to see the AVG Free 8.0 Linkscanner not being compatible with FF 3.0. I found it a very usefull tool, and hope it will return.

Mozilla Firefox Free Download said on : June 28th, 2008 at 9:12 am

Thank you for the great informational post. Good read.

Jesse Hromcik said on : July 4th, 2008 at 6:20 pm

Why did they feel the need to reinvent the wheel concerning the bookmarks tab, the new one is inefficient and weird, and not in a good way. Also, they should make turning off History easy to find, if it’s even possible. We certain departments not even thinking, I’m wondering what other changes are completely unnecessary, and were they changed just to say they did something. Don’t fix what is not broken, or at the very least continue to provide people with options that don’t suck.

moin said on : July 9th, 2008 at 6:23 pm

thats a good review, to make it short i personally dislike some features of firefox and there are some bugs too which i hope they’ll fix in next version

Tom said on : August 28th, 2008 at 4:46 pm

The awesome bar blows in FF3. I don’t see how anyone can enjoy having half their screen taken up by every bookmark and site they have been to. I think these are the same people who find “Tool bars” useful. I mean how hard is it to move your mouse a hair over to the bookmarks tab

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