This week is Firefox week in xptricks.net. We will post many reviews and tips about Firefox and other browsers, so stay tuned. Here is the complete guide to this week’s posts. You might find it handy to bookmark us (Ctrl + D) or subscribe to our feed.
Lets start off with our review of Firefox 3.
Firefox 3 is the latest (and best) version of the worlds most popular browser. The Mozilla Team has managed to fix almost all of Firefox 2’s errors and problems and Firefox 3 is almost as good as a browser can get. Both design and functionality have improved and the options as an open source browser are literally limitless.
The first thing you notice after installing, are the new icons at the top-left of the screen. Everything is sharper and even simpler than before. Except, of course, for the green, glassy back/forward buttons (blue on Vista). They have been rounded, pushed together and slapped into a “keyhole” in the interface. Rather Internet Explorer-ish, I must say. Quite pretty, nevertheless.There have also been other significant changes to the Firefox UI. For example, the Go button has been removed (although it reappears while typing an address) and the Bookmark this and Subscribe to this have conveniently replaced it. The favicon of a website is now in a separate box at the left of the address bar. Mine, as you can see, is a Windows flag.
Browsing History and Bookmarking have also been redesigned, and now, when you start typing an address, you get a much smarter list of previously visited (or bookmarked) sites.
There have been numerous changes under the bonnet. You might not see them but you’ll probably notice that Firefox has got a lot faster and smarter since the update. Firefox 2’s biggest mistake - a weird solution for saving browsed images and sites that takes up a hell of a lot of disk space - has of course been fixed as well.