Get Firefox Now

Firefox Beta 3 has been released some days ago, I have installed it and made a little comparison with Firefox 2.0 to see some of the changes.

Here I am comparing them with screen shots, side by side when that is possible, because there are some features in 3 that are not present in 2.

Zooming

When you zoom with firefox 2 you can only zoom the text and not the images, but now with Firefox 3 the images are also zoomed, so you can zoom a page with text and images, or only images pages.

Firefox 2

Firefox 3

Bookmarking

One of the biggest changes on Firefox 3 is the way it manage bookmarks, and its interface also changed.

Firefox 2

Firefox 3

Check out that now, it s possible to use tags, what I have tried was to import my delicious directly to Firefox, to my concern tags were not imported, maybe a mistake considering how many people are using delicious out there.

By the way, and talking about delicious there is not yet a plugin for it, by the time I am writing this post, there is one for stumbleupon just released yesterday.

Other changes to bookmarking includes the stars, now as soon as you start typing the address you want to visit and when the visited (suggested) URIs appear you can easily check which one is already on your bookmarks, because of the star near to the URI.

Firefox 3

And once you are visiting a page, if you do not want to use the shortcut Ctrl+D, you can just click on the star near to the URI, and a dialog box will be displayed so you can easily add that page to your bookmarks.

Firefox 3

Places

This is something new in Firefox 3, that does not even exist in Firefox 2, it is a menu located upper left and as you can see, it helps you navigate in your “favorite” pages, the most visited, the most used tags, the recently visited, etc.

Firefox 3

Password Manager

The dialog box offering to remember your passwords now appears located in other position it certainly looks better, but I do miss the “not now” option, don’t you?

Update: Thanks for all of you that made me find it (sorry)

Firefox 3

Firefox 2

Add-ons

The add-ons dialog box (Tools-Add-ons) now has another option, which is Plugins, where you can manage the plugins installed on your Firefox, really a good addition.

Firefox 3

Firefox 2

Page Info

The page info dialog box (Tools->Page Info, or Ctrl+I) now has a real good option which is RSS discover, so you can easily find the rss links on the page to subscribe to it.

Firefox 3

Firefox 2

(Originally reviewed by matty2 at reviewcentre.com)

Good Points

Free!
Nice browser layout
Easy to use browser layout
LITTLE search box at the top
Tabbed browsing
Customisable (sic)
Bookmark toolbar

Bad Points

Browser will collapse if you tweak a few settings
Hard to access history & favourites.

General Comments

First of all, I’m am glad to say that this browser is faster, more reliable, more customisable, and safer than the rest of them. Firefox is also free for download, which automatically boosts value for money up to 10/10.

Tabbed browsing is in place of windowed browsing (loads of windows open). Tabbed browsing was invented so you only have one window and all of the tabs are easy to get to without the hassle of the system memory packing up. Now, let me get this straight: Firefox didn’t invent tabbed browsing. Opera didn’t either. It was a browser called Netcaptor. Anyway, tabbed browsing is a fine feature in web browsing.

Another feature of Firefox is the bookmark toolbar. It allows you to click on a link already in the browser layout, instead of having to go into the favourites folder. It saves you time! You can still save favourites in the favourites folder, though.

Firefox is almost completely customisable. You can change the toolbar pictures, move them around, add or remove them… etc. You can also download different skins for it.

The amount of plug-ins (add-ons) available for Firefox is uncountable. The range from ForcastFox (Weather) to FasterFox (it should make Firefox faster) to Map+ (A map, obviously).

Also, you have the search bar at the top. This one isn’t one that will decapitate your view of the web page. All is does is sit there nicely in the top-right corner chopping off a little bit of the address bar. It lets you search through many search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others like Amazon, Ebay, and Answers.

Unfortunately, everything has it’s downsides. The problem with Firefox is that if you dive into the ‘Tools’ bar, you may change some settings that could obliterate the usage of Firefox. In other words: “A teensy bit of fiddling and your driving down diarrhea drive. That is not good.”

You also may have a bit of difficulty accessing the history and favourites (bookmarks) unless you get them from the top toolbar or put the icons on the browser through the customise window.

Overall, Firefox is, in my opinion, much better than Internet Explorer 7 and is great as it is free.

At version 1.5, Mozilla’s Firefox browser is still brand new software. Yet with recent detail improvements, this browser is already a wonderful alternative to using Microsoft’s IE6 browser.

OVERVIEW

Good: Firefox has a super-small installation (4.9MB), tabbed browsing, multiple shortcut features, integrating pop-up ad blocking, integrated Google search, large viewing area, compatibility with IE shortcuts/ favorites/cookies, clean interface, very user friendly design, and no glaring security holes.

Bad: images load 30% slower than IE; Firefox does not integrate well with Outlook email or Pocket PC Synching; browser plug-ins like Flash and Shockwave require extra user effort to install; some Javascripts will not run in Firefox. Some online banks and other password-protected websites are not designed to allow Firefox users.

Overall: Despite its small flaws, Firefox is an excellent browser that is within a two years of unseating Microsoft IE from its throne.

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. Disclaimer: Alex’s company AdaptiveBlue has a product called The blueorganizer, which is a Firefox extension. This review was originally posted on readwriteweb.com.

In this post, we take a look at what the Firefox team is going to deliver in their upcoming major release: Firefox 2.0. We ask the question: will it be enough to make significant ground on IE?

Current browser market

In just a few years, Firefox has taken the previously dormant browsing market by storm and woken the slumbering giant Microsoft. The Mozilla browser now owns 12-14% of the browser market (the number varies depending on the source - see Wikipedia for more). The Firefox brand is also making an impact, thanks in part to the Spread Firefox campaign. For example, last year Firefox was voted the #7 global brand by brandchannel.com. But the question is still up in the air: will Firefox ever get close to Internet Explorer’s market share?

IE: you snooze, you lose?

A recent post about IE7 on TechCrunch generated a lot of comments complaining about the lack of innovation in the Microsoft product. The timeline between IE6 and IE7 has been unusually long by software standards, so it was reasonable to expect a decent amount of innovation. But despite major improvements and work towards standards support, IE7 looks like a Firefox wannabe.

So one would expect that Firefox has a chance to further cut down IE’s lead in the browser market, by introducing further innovation and continuing to improve the browsing user experience. Let’s look and see…

User interface improvements

The first thing that stands out in the new Firefox is the more modern, snappier look and feel. Everything is more shinny, more playful and more clickable.

Tabbed browsing was a major browser innovation that Firefox popularized - and in version 2.0 there are further improvements to this. By default, the links now open in a new tab instead of a new window and each tab has its own close button. There is also a new handy way of switching between the tabs, via a pulldown list of all open tabs.

All these improvements are subtle, but good productivity boosters for the user.

Search improvements

Search is probably the most fundamental thing we do online and Firefox excels at integrating search engines in a very smart way. With this new release, Firefox adds the search completion mechanism, which works just like Google complete. As soon as the user starts typing, potential search phrases show up.

This feature has been also added to the Firefox search engine format, allowing each search engine to support it.

RSS Reader integration

Perhaps the most interesting new thing in Firefox 2.0 is the integration of RSS Readers. Since its early days, Firefox has made a commitment to usability and ease of use, which implies integrating all things web right into the browser. Wiring search engines into the browser is one example. In Firefox 2.0 we now see similar integration done with RSS readers.

When a user navigates to a page which contains an RSS feed, the RSS icon in the URL bar lights up. If the user clicks the icon, she is given a choice to subscribe to the feed using either LiveBookmarks or one of the popular online readers like Google Reader. This is a nice and clean integration, but one can’t help but wish to have an RSS Reader built right into the browser. Flock, for example, features one of the best RSS Readers and it makes a big difference for end user experience (note: Flock is a R/WW sponsor).

Other notable improvements

There are a number of software improvements in Firefox 2.0. Some of them are:

• Fixed memory leaks and improved performance
• Built-in phishing protection will warn the user of suspicious sites
• Persistent sessions will restore the session after system restart
• Smart spell checking for web forms
• Live Titles and microsummaries help sites convey the latest interesting content
• Improved add-on manager helps the users manage extensions and themes
• Enhanced security and localization support for extensions
• Support for JavaScript 1.7

The Firefox 2.0 release notes have more details.

Will this be enough?

It might not seem like Firefox 2.0 has a lot of new features, but we think it is a solid release. The team’s focus on performance, stability, usablity and security clearly results in a better, faster product - and users will be pleased with that.

However it is also clear that Firefox needs to do more innovation and web integration in order to gain bigger market share. In future we hope to see better bookmarks, better history, a built-in RSS Reader, more productivity features and more smart web integrations. Perhaps with advanced functionality like this, Firefox would make significant ground on IE. What do you think?

(Originally reviewed by kiyawhite at reviewcentre.com)

Good Points

>Loads web pages quickly
>Barely restricts transfer rates, especially when compared to other browsers
>Tabbed browsing

Bad Points

>Horrible download manager facility
>Not as well designed and user-friendly as AOL 9.0
>Not as easy-to-use as the clear interface used in Internet Explorer 6/7beta

General Comments

I never really wanted to try Mozilla Firefox as a browser, but when a visitor arrived at my house and saw me using AOL 9.0 on my computer he immediately said, “Get Firefox, NOW!,” or something similar.

so that’s what I did.
Downloading and installing the browser was as easy as any other piece of software. When I first opened the browser, it didn’t look as eye-catching as I thought it would look after all of the good stuff I had been told about it. It appeared messy and unattractive. Upon use, it turned out that the interface wasn’t that good. True, I must say that transfer speeds when downloading webpage’s to view had improved, but upon testing it was only by about 6kbps, which doesn’t make much difference as I’m on broadband anyway.

what astonished me about this browser was the apparent lack of plug-ins! It didn’t seem to have any available to it! Where were they all? The program’s virtual interface had been put together in such a way that the browser needs a plug-in to do almost every interactive thing you’d like to on the net and, at the time, it didn’t seem as if there weren’t any available to get!
Now some more are appearing, but still at a very slow rate.