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

Page Info Dialog

The old Page Info dialog underwent a major overhaul for this release of Firefox, as Figure 7, “The new Page Info dialog for Firefox 3” shows. It features some pretty icons instead of tabs, and it is now accessible via:

• Tools > Page Info—the same as always
• the address bar—just click on the new “identity button” to bring up the identity overlay dialog and click More Information…; you’ll be taken directly to the Page Info > Security tab

Why would you want to access Page Info frequently, though? Because it can do amazing things, of course! Perhaps the most important new feature is the ability to save site-specific preferences via the Permissions tab. More specifically, the following site-specific settings have been added:

• Load Images
• Open Pop-up Windows
• Set Cookies
• Install Extensions or Themes

What Firefox actually does, though, is nothing but set an appropriate exception (which will appear immediately in Options > Content > [specific content type] Exception) for the current web site. That’s all? Yes, that’s all, but believe me, it’s a big time saver.

A similar behavior can also be found in the Security tab—clicking on View Cookies and View Passwords will lead you to the cookie and password manager respectively, but with a filter already set for the current domain name. Now you realize why Mozilla developers have implemented search filters everywhere—they provide a very smart and elegant solution, delivering two new features for the price of one.

A Few Little Things …

Additionally, a few small but still significant things were improved or added to the GUI:

• discontinuous text selection, like in MS Word or MS OneNote and other fancy office programs
• full-page zoom: it’s possible to zoom in “properly,” not only on text, but on images as well. Moreover, Firefox will remember the zoom level you set for a particular page (although the page will actually be resized a fraction of a second after loading)
• smoother tab scrolling, via the mouse wheel
• tab cloning—just drag a tab holding Ctrl to copy it instead of moving it
• resizable search bar—just drag the separator between the address and search bars
• “real” full screen is accessible simply by hitting F11 (even the address bar and tabs will be hidden!)

That’s it for the user interface. Okay, so it looks pretty and it’s more usable, but what about under the hood? In the next section, we’ll take a look at a crucial part of the new Firefox—security.

Security

Security has always been one of the main concerns of the Mozilla Foundation. In fact, one of the most common Firefox marketing slogans was “Browse the web more securely.”

Web Site Identification

Firefox 3 delivers more security-oriented features than previous versions of the browser. Whenever you visit a web site that’s authenticated via a SSL certificate, if the certificate is valid and verified you’ll see the name of the organization that owns the site on a green background right next to the site icon in the address bar.

Try it yourself by visiting paypal.com. Clicking the new “identify web site” icon (the favicon next to the address bar) will open an overlay dialog that displays more information about the owners of the web site and the authority that verified its identify. Additionally, a green icon displaying a passport officer will be shown, as Figure 8, “Using Firefox’s new web site identification features” illustrates. That’s the signal Firefox uses to say “this site is safe, carry on browsing.” Personally, I’d have opted for a less cheesy image, but this one certainly does the job.

If you’re still not satisfied with the information provided about the site, you can click the More Information… button to access the Security tab of the Page Info dialog, where it’s possible to view the site’s security certificates, cookies, technical details, and more.

If you’re visiting a web site that doesn’t have a SSL certificate, no name is shown next to the icon in the address bar, and the background remains gray. Clicking it will display an overlay dialog to indicate that the web site doesn’t supply identity information.

Things change slightly if you visit a web site with which a security certificate is associated that uses the https protocol, but there’s a problem with the certificate (usually it has expired: this may even happen with corporate intranet sites). When you visit such a site, the site won’t display, and a standard Firefox error page will show. The message says “Secure Connection Failed,” and it’s accompanied by the usual icon featuring the policemen, this time with a yellow background.

Apparently there’s no way to view the site you’re trying to access (which scared me to death when I tried to access one of our intranet sites at work!). Luckily, if you click the Or you can add an exception… link at the bottom of the dialog, you can choose whether to Get out of here… (yes, it literally says that). Doing so will take you back to the standard Firefox start page, or prompt you to Add an exception.

This turns out to be a really useful feature if you frequently have to browse web sites whose security certificates expire because nobody bothered to pay the yearly renewal: once you add an exception, you’ll be able to browse the site with no warnings at all—which is something neither Firefox 2 nor IE 7 allow you to do.

Adding an exception is relatively painless:

1. Click the Add Exception… button.


2. In the Add Security Exception dialog, click the Get Certificate button.


3. Once the certificate has been retrieved, you can optionally view it by clicking the View button.


4. Click Confirm Security Exception (the Permanently Store This Exception checkbox is enabled by default).

For more information about web site identification in Firefox 3, check out Deb Richardson’s blog post (it also contains a precise explanation of each “passport officer” icon).

Password Management

The other security-related area which has been improved in Firefox 3 is the password management system. What’s wrong with the way Firefox 2 stored and managed passwords? Let’s see …

• An obtrusive, extremely annoying modal dialog asked you whether you want to save the credential you just provided, before they were submitted. The number of incorrect passwords I stored as a result of this feature was embarrassingly high.
• If you wanted to view a password for a specific site, either you remembered the exact URL of the site, or you had to manually scroll down the list of sites for which a password was stored.

Both issues have been fixed in Firefox 3:

• Password Dialogs are no longer modal. Instead, they slide down from the top of the page allowing you to continue browsing. Furthermore, they’re smart enough to appear only after you actually logged in.
• Search capability has been added to the Saved Passwords dialog. What a great idea: a simple change that saves precious minutes of users’ time.

What’s left to improve? Well, it would be nice to have the secure login extension built in, maybe with an icon in the address bar (you can do virtually anything in it, even post to Twitter).

Now that we’ve explored the ways in which Firefox 3 is more secure than its predecessor, let’s see how it performs.