Firefox 3: What's New, What's Hot, and What's Not

Welcome To Firefox 3! The third major release of the much-acclaimed Firefox web browser is out. Although slightly belated, this release actually is another important chapter in open source history: Firefox 3 is truly much better than its predecessors (yes, all of them!).

If you weren’t too happy with Firefox 2—many quickly tired of its slowness, unattractive appearance, and bare-bones interface (without extensions installed, that is)—you’ll be glad to find out that Firefox 3 is much faster, more modern looking, and packed with new, very interesting features. A large number of users (including me) ended up switching to another browser such as Opera because they couldn’t endure the severe memory problems of Firefox 2. Different browsers have different problems, though, and while I learned to enjoy Opera’s extremely quick response and handy built-in features, I undoubtedly missed some of Firefox extensions. Common pleas from users of Firefox 2 included:

• If only Firefox could be faster …
• If only Firefox didn’t eat up so much RAM …
• If only this or that could be improved …

Well, it looks like Mozilla developers really did listen to their users, and the final product truly deserves praise. Let’s find out why. If you're keen to read this article offline, you can download it in PDF format here.

A Streamlined User Interface

Even if a lot of new features are actually “under the hood,” Firefox 3 definitely looks different in many different ways. There’s a new default theme (sorry, make that four default themes), and plenty of GUI improvements.

Visual Refresh

If you’ve already tried out Firefox 3—and you should have, by now—the first thing you would have noticed is its new default theme. No matter which operating system you’re running, it is indeed different.

Alex Faaborg, in writing about the Firefox 3 visual refresh, wrote:

“One reason we want to focus to this level of detail on visual integration with various platforms is because the web browser is an incredibly central piece of the user’s operating system, and we don’t want the user’s initial reaction to be that they have modified their computer to add some type of strange, foreign application.”

While this comment may have made some users rejoice, I wasn’t too happy with the default Windows XP theme, shown in Figure 1, “The new Firefox 3 theme for Windows XP”—it just doesn’t feel as if it’s integrated with the operating system at all! If you compare the Windows XP theme with the Windows Vista theme, the only real difference is the color of the arrows: blue for Vista, and green for XP. Apparently the icons were designed by Iconfactory (as were the Windows XP and Vista icons).

On the other hand, they did a truly awesome job with the default Mac OS X theme: it looks more or less like a native Mac application, even if the small-icon mode is a bit too similar to Safari’s.

What about Linux? It hasn’t been left out—the Tango theme looks perfect on Ubuntu, although I haven’t tested it on the KDE windows manager.

Although some of the themes are really well done, I don’t fully understand the necessity of this move. Nobody else is bothering with this: Safari even used the same Mac skin on Windows! Sure, some people prefer a more OS-integrated look and feel, but even Opera came up with the new, shiny, and cross-platform Sharp theme. But, as they say, you can’t argue about taste.

The AwesomeBar

Remember when you first used the search bar in Firefox? You just had to type in the words you wanted to search for in Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine, press Enter, and the corresponding search result page was loaded automatically for you. This feature is a simple, yet very powerful concept that’s now an essential part of every mainstream browser.

Can you imagine using a browser without using the search bar nowadays? Unless it offers something equivalent and possibly more useful like K-Meleon’s Ctrl-G to fire up a Google search from the address bar, no, of course you can’t.

I experienced a sort of déja-vu when I tried out the new navigation bar in Firefox 3, pictured in Figure 2, “The Firefox 3 AwesomeBar in action”, which was immediately dubbed AwesomeBar due to its unique and remarkable versatility.

The idea seems simple (to the user’s eyes, at least): add search-as-you-type capability to the Firefox bar, looking through all the entries in your Firefox history and bookmarks. What’s not so simple is coming up with results that are actually meaningful, as Edward Lee described last year in his post, SmartBar to AwesomeBar:

Now, this feature is truly useful. In a nutshell, here’s what the new AwesomeBar lets you do:

• Search your history and bookmarks for any combination of words while you’re typing.
• Restrict your searches to bookmarks, history or tagged pages only by prepending your search terms with “*”, “^” or “+” respectively.
• Match whole phrases by enclosing words within double quotes.
• Provides search results ordered by frequency and recency.

Compared to the alternatives offered by competitors, the smart searching capabilities offered by Firefox seem far more advanced and useful. Opera 9.5 offers integrated history search within the address bar, but I must admit that the AwesomeBar puts it to shame.