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

New Places

When I discovered del.icio.us, I slowly started to move my seemingly endless list of Firefox bookmarks to The Cloud. When Yahoo released its official del.icio.us extension for Firefox, I completely forgot about Firefox bookmarks, and I’m still very happy with my choice.

Firefox 3 takes browser-based bookmarking to a whole new level by introducing Places, a feature that’s demonstrated in Figure 3, “Storing bookmarks with Firefox 3’s Places”.

The Places feature offers a single interface to organize your History and your Bookmarks at the same time. This interface (accessible via Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks) comes packed with a load of new features:

• You can now move pages you visited directly into your bookmark folders by dragging and dropping them, and promoting them to bookmarks (of course you can’t do the opposite, though).
• You can search as you type for bookmarks and history items, and perform advanced search queries by defining matching rules on the page title, date visited, and location.
• You can save search queries as persistent search folders.
• You can tag your bookmarks by specifying a list of comma-separated tags.
• You can access the most recent bookmarks and tags as well as the most visited bookmarks via three “smart folders.”
• You can bookmark a page with just one click, simply by clicking on the star in the address bar. To specify a folder and tags, and change the title, just click the star again.
• You can back up and restore your bookmarks via a convenient drop-down menu; additionally, it’s not necessary to back up your bookmarks anymore, as they’re automatically backed up every day.
• You can customize the way you view bookmarks and history items by controlling the fields to display as well as applying different sort criteria.

Personally, I can’t think of anything else that would improve your bookmarking experience in Firefox. Maybe better del.icio.us integration? There’s no need: the new official del.icio.us extension is perfectly integrated with Firefox Places and allows you—among other things—to import your local bookmarks to del.icio.us with a single click.

Furthermore, there are rumors that the AwesomeBar is likely to replace the search bar in future releases of Firefox.

Download Manager

Did you ever try to download a big file with Firefox 2? I did, and I regretted it half an hour later when I discovered that the file could not be downloaded because some error occurred. Of course, because Firefox 2’s Download Manager didn’t support resuming even if the FTP server did, I had no choice but to restart the download with a third-party download manager.

Fortunately, this issue is now a thing of the past: the new Download Manager lives up to its name, finally! It’s shown in Figure 4, “The new and improved Firefox 3 Download Manager”.

First of all, it allows you to pause downloads and resume them later, even if you exited Firefox in the meantime. Cross-session resume has been perhaps the most long-awaited improvement for Firefox Download Manager, and now it simply works as everyone expected it to.

But there’s more:

• A summary of all the files currently being downloaded and the estimated download time is now displayed in the status bar. If you click this text, you’ll open the Download Manager without having to navigate through the Tools menu.
• It is possible to perform a search-as-you-type of the filenames you've recently downloaded simply by entering text inside the search box in the bottom right-hand corner of the Download Manager.
• A few buttons are displayed automatically to pause, resume, cancel, and restart downloads.
• The Download Manager is now integrated with the third-party anti-virus program installed on your computer, so that every file you download will be scanned automatically, for extra security.

Add-on Manager

Similarly, the Add-on Manager, shown in Figure 5, “The Add-on Manager in Firefox 3”, has been improved. It now features four buttons at the top, to load four different views:

Get Add-ons
A list of recommended add-ons is now automatically displayed (and updated) in this view. This means that you can install your favorite add-ons without having to go to the Mozilla Add-ons web site. It even lets you directly search add-ons!

Extensions
Nothing too new here—it’s just a list of the extensions that are currently installed. It’s possible to set each extension’s options, disable it, and uninstall it, through this interface.

Themes
The themes view displays the currently installed theme; it lets you choose a theme and uninstall previously installed themes.

Plugins
This one is new—finally a list of all your plugins (Flash, Acrobat, Java, etc.) can easily be accessed by end users, without having to type about:plugins in the address bar. It’s possible to selectively disable specific plugins from this view, too.

This is all good, but the killer feature has yet to be released. At the moment, it’s still necessary to restart the browser when you’re installing an add-on. Apparently this feature was planned but didn’t make the cut because it involved core changes that were too invasive.

Opera doesn’t require you to restart the browser once you install a new theme, but of course Opera doesn’t support plugins. If you just want to update the design of the current Firefox theme, you can always use Personas, after all!

Options Dialog

A few relevant changes were also made to the Options dialog (still accessible via Tools > Options…). As Figure 7, “The new Page Info dialog for Firefox 3” illustrates, the first thing to notice is the new OS-dependent icon set used for the top buttons. However, if you look more carefully, you’ll see that a new Applications button has been added.

The Applications tab lets you customize the way Firefox handles known file types and protocols.

The view is divided into two columns, the first listing content types, while the other displays the action that’s to be performed when that particular content type is accessed. The big improvement is that now it’s no longer necessary to hack through about:config settings to set content handles: now, you’re allowed to browse for a specific set of predefined actions using a GUI.

I was actually very impressed by how refined the application’s GUI is—in this release, it appears much more refined then Opera’s. Firefox will try to find an appropriate plugin (if installed) to handle file content, but you can also select your favorite application via a dialog that shows all the installed applications which can open that particular file type.

Additionally, if you prefer, you can set the action to Always ask if you want Firefox to display the usual Open/Save dialog. Besides file actions, you can also set the default action for common Internet protocols and service handlers like mailto, webcal, or web feeds. Some default online apps can also be selected. For example, for web feeds it’s possible to specify Bloglines, Yahoo, or Google. What if your online app isn’t listed? Tough luck. Apparently, you’ll have to go through the usual about:config settings like you did in the old days. Unfortunately, this also applies to the mailto handler, for which only Yahoo Mail is provided as a default. If you’d like to use Gmail, you might want to check out how to do so on LifeHacker.

Other minor, but still worthwhile, improvements include the following:

• You have the ability to use the search-as-you-type feature when searching the contents of your browser’s cookies. This can be very handy, but unfortunately the search is performed on the cookie contents, not on the domain, so if you type in google, you’ll get a lot of results (that is, any cookie that has “google” in its content, and there are many).
• In the Advanced tab, it’s possible to view the history of your Firefox updates, and to configure the way the browser checks for updates.