Mozilla Firefox 3 – A Revolution in Browsing

Millions of people today are experiencing a better Internet by using the open source Firefox web browser. Finally, there is a viable alternative to Internet Explorer. While Internet Explorer 6 remains the most popular browser in use today, with about 48% market share, Mozilla Firefox is quickly catching up, and currently hovers around the 30% mark. With community marketing initiatives like the Spread Firefox project, Firefox looks ready to take on IE in the weeks and months to come. While Firefox 2, the latest stable version of Firefox, is extremely powerful and usable, Firefox 3 is already in the pipeline. Here’s what’s coming in the next version of Firefox.

Firefox 3 has had a lot of buzz around it lately. Everything about it is looking pretty good. Among its chief features? A better download manager. You can now filter completed downloads with a powerful search function. Also, the download manager can integrate with your anti-virus solution. Furthermore, it offers better resume support, so if something happens in the middle of your download, you have a far better chance of being able to simply continue from where you left off, instead of going all the way back to the beginning.

Another wonderful feature is one-click bookmarking. Many people today are frustrated by the slow bookmarking experience, and thus cease doing it altogether. The popularity of del.icio.us is key evidence of the usefulness of bookmarking when simplified. Firefox 3 offers 1-click bookmarking via stars, so you can just click a star to bookmark a page, much like starring a message in Google Gmail.

Firefox 3 offers better security, many fixed bugs, and patched memory leaks. While FIrefox 2 could swell up and use almost all your system memory with no sign of giving it back. Firefox 3 has patched its leaks so that memory it does use is put to use most efficiently. This effectively speeds up and smooths out your browsing experience.

There’s a better “Save Password” dialog included with FF3, which displays password-saving button options in a thin bar at the top of the screen. This is similar to the already-existing search bar, which so many users love. Additionally. the login information is sent to the server right away, allowing you to choose whether to save the password only after you know it was the correct one. This is a very good feature for me, as I know I’ve wasted a lot of time fiddling with the save password dialog.

By supporting animated PNG images, we might be able to finally get rid of the patent-ridden GIF nightmare. GIFs were kept around because they’re the only image format supporting animation. But now that PNG can do it, at least in Firefox 3, it should only be a matter of time before we see this spreading across the web. Let’s just hope IE can keep things up on their side of the camp.

Although the FF3 beta was scheduled for July, it was delayed due to performance regressions. The big focus during beta release cycles is on quality assurance and bug fixing. As a former Google Software Quality Assurance Engineering Intern, I can say that’s a big job and they’re probably sifting through tons of bugs right now. Firefox 3 uses Gecko 1.9, a new version of Firefox’s HTML rendering engine. It passes the Acid 2 CSS test, which is a test case developed by the Web Standards Project. It now has support for full-page zoom.

It has a new “Places” feature, which is a cohesive storage framework leveraging SQLite rather than flat files, and unifies bookmark and history storage, much like on Safari. I noticed this on my iPhone: History is actually a special folder in Bookmarks. Users can also do bookmark tagging, and the starring process makes it much easier to bookmark a page. In the URL auto-complete dropdown, stars are shown next to bookmarked pages. Pretty cool!

The other benefit of using an SQLite-powered bookmark system is that it supports elaborate search queries, allowing you to create “smart bookmarks.” Here’s an example: place:folder=2&folder=287&queryType=1&sort=8&minVisits=1&maxResults=10

There are also lots of improvements for developers under the hood, like a new scripting API for bookmark and history queries. There are also new JavaScript features, including support for generator expressions, iterators, expression clauses, and a new getElementsByClassName method.