Thursday, February 14, 2008

Firefox Version 3 Review

Firefox 3.0b3 (beta) can be found downloaded from the Mozilla website.

So far the browser seems to load faster as well as load pages faster, although this could be because I had 10+ addons that are currently disabled because they arent compatible with this new version.

At first glance there arent many significant changes to the appearance. Upon closer inspection you'll see the navigation buttons have changed and the location of the home button has moved to the bookmarks toolbar.

The location bar is the big change. Dropping it down for the first time can be overwhelming, so be prepared. Each entry now contains the name of the site, the full web address and favicon.

Although I'm a big fan of the add-ons particularly the gestures (yes those half seconds do add up) I can live without them for the time being. Mozilla has claimed over 1200 changes since the last release, but so far my forward and back navigation buttons have dissapeared twice. Luckily I'm a big user of my mouse shortcut keys, otherwise I'd have to move back to the previous version.