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

Beyond Firefox

Firefox is definitely the most well-known of the Mozilla Foundation’s products, but there are a few other interesting projects worth keeping an eye on.

Fennec

Fennec is the codename for a new Mozilla project aimed to create a competitive web browser for the mobile phone market. This is not the first time the Mozilla Foundation attempted to build a mobile browser: Minimo actually worked, but compared to competitors such as Opera Mobile and Internet Explorer Mobile, it’s very slow and heavy on the memory usage—or at least it is on my WM6 phone.
Fennec, on the other hand, aims to become a lightweight, feature-rich, and innovative mobile browser, and although it’s still in pre-alpha stage, Ars Technica reports that it’s already quite usable. Figure 12, “Fennec: Firefox for the mobile web” shows the Fennec browser in action.

This would be quite an achievement for the Mozilla Foundation, as it would be the first significant free and open source mobile browser ever made.

Prism

Mozilla Prism is another lesser-known Mozilla project aimed to bring web applications to the desktop. Essentially, it’s nothing more than a single-tab, extremely minimalist browser which can be used to run common web applications like Gmail or Google Reader on the desktop.

In its current state, it’s nothing more than a fancy way to create and handle shortcuts to web applications; those shortcuts, when clicked, will open Prism and load the web address for the web application specified by the user.

Why bother? Well, it’s a matter of perception more than anything: it’s about having a separate, distraction-free browser to use just for a single web application. Things will actually become more interesting when proper support for offline applications is included.

At the moment, there are quite a few interesting features in Prism’s wish list:

• Enable extension support so Prism can be tweaked or enhanced. Also, web apps themselves can be tweaked via extensions.
• Add menus for page setup, open profile, and work offline.
• Add url/domain/subdomain restrictions (external links won’t work).
• Load “sidebar services.” That is, users have the option to load services that are intended to load in a sidebar (Google Chat and Google Notebook have specific web pages designed for the sidebar, for example); such a page will load in Prism as a fixed-size window on the left of the screen.
• Optionally configure a web app so that it doesn’t share cookies with other web apps in the same Prism. This could allow multiple Google apps to be open with different accounts (an a@gmail.com Gmail account; a b@msn.com Reader account; and c@hostedgmail.com for hosted Gmail).

When those features are implemented, Prism will definitely become more interesting.

Weave

If Prism aims to bring the Web to the desktop, Mozilla Weave is focused on the very opposite: bring your browser (Firefox) to the Web.

You can think of it as a smart synchronization platform, to synchronize multiple instance of Firefox through the Internet, in a similar way as Opera Link does.

Weave is, as a matter of fact, just an ordinary Firefox extension. All you have to do is install it, register for an account, and off you go.

At its current stage, Weave gives the user the possibility to synchronize:

• bookmarks
• cookies
• passwords
• history
• form data

Compared to Opera Link, which lets you synchronize your bookmarks, speed dial, personal bar, and notes, Weave seems to be ahead in term of features, and perhaps maturity as well. I have been using it for a few months, and I must say I’m quite satisfied, even if I hardly use Firefox bookmarks at all.

The aim of this project—to me at least—seems crystal clear: offer such a useful service that it makes you stick to Firefox for life. That’s how it feels, anyway.

Think about it: Firefox 3 comes with a really fancy bookmarks and history manager, which lets you bookmark pages with one click and tag them with two. The AwesomeBar lets you search your bookmarks and history in a really smart way, and Weave makes sure that wherever you go, you’ll always be able access all the pages you need quickly.

I must admit that I’m seriously tempted to drop del.icio.us and just start using Firefox Bookmarks instead: if you use del.icio.us or other social bookmarking services just to store your bookmarks online and make them available wherever you are, then Weave is ideal.

There’s only one problem with it: it’s Firefox-dependent. That’s the reason why I’m not using it extensively: I don’t want to become dependent on it, and I don’t want to become dependent on Firefox either! That’s not because I don’t like Firefox, but because I’m a browser addict and I love experimenting with as many browsers as possible.

Weave isn’t feature-complete, of course. To be feature-complete, it would have to be able to synchronize your add-ons, extensions, and themes: at that point, it would become almost irresistible. Imagine the possibilities for both users and the Mozilla Foundation: Firefox your web platform, wherever you are! Neat, and scary, too.

The Bottom Line

Firefox 3 is—as with every major release—the best release of Firefox ever. This time, the number of new features that were released is truly impressive:

• End users will be pleased to use a much faster and prettier browser.
• Web developers won’t change the way they develop web sites, but may at least try to experiment with new HTML 5 elements and features.
• Extension developers will be able to interact with the browser’s internals more easily, thanks to the huge number of new APIs that have been made available (and are fully documented!).

Personally, I felt that this release was focused very much on accessibility, both in terms of user interface and new developer APIs.

In particular, you can search and filter everything from almost anywhere in the GUI: the Firefox team added search support to almost every single browser module, and they reduced the number of clicks you need to use to access certain functions. This is something that is not yet available in other browsers, and is perhaps one of the most significant improvements on past releases.

The progressive adoption of new standards—and even drafts—is also quite remarkable. As a matter of fact, Opera is still ahead in this case, but Firefox is catching up quickly.

When it comes to web development, it doesn’t really matter which browser supports more features; the important consideration is which features are supported by more browsers. For this reason, web developers will definitely be pleased to hear that they can safely use the contentEditable attribute because it’s supported by three major browsers, rather than discovering that Firefox only offers embryonic support for offline applications.

Compared to Opera and Safari, in particular, Firefox is likely to remain a slower and heavier browser, for a simple reason: its very architecture. Firefox is very open and modular, and allows users to install a plethora of extensions, while others don’t.

Opera and Safari are not likely to open up any time soon (even if WebKit, as a matter of fact, is open source), and they won’t offer extensions either: those, it seems, are unique to Firefox, and will remain so.

It all boils down to what users want. If you want a browser that can be customized in every possible way, and can become anything you want, from an MP3 player to an FTP client, Firefox is definitely the best (and the only) choice. On the other hand, if you want “just a browser”, which does its job really well, you may want to check out Opera and (when it becomes a bit more stable) Safari.

Conclusion

To conclude, I’d like to congratulate everyone who made Firefox 3 possible: developers, testers, and all active users who “do their part,” in one way or another. It really feels like the Mozilla team is doing its very best to listen to users and their feedback, and this release is a clear example that open source can still deliver the most outstanding software, just the way you want it.

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