June 1, 2008

Cool Features in Firefox 3

If you decide to upgrade from Firefox 2 to the first release candidate of Firefox 3, you'll notice an improved performance, less memory leaks, a revamped interface and some very interesting new features:

* select discontinuous text - press Ctrl while selecting different blocks of text, like you can do in Microsoft Office


* I've always liked about Notepad2 that you can select a text and open the Find dialog to search for your selection. Firefox 3 brings this feature to improve its already powerful find-in-page.

Tip: Select some text and press Ctrl+G to find the next occurrence of that text.

* Google Toolbar 4 for IE made bookmarking a very easy task: just press on the star button to bookmark a web page and press again if you want to add tags or edit the title. The latest version of Google's plugin complicated the feature a little bit, but Firefox 3 borrowed the initial concept and changed the way you bookmark web pages. Furthermore, you can now associate tags to bookmarks and find the most visited bookmarks.


* the address bar auto-completes URLs and page titles, while trying to prioritize web pages visited frequently and recently. "Dubbed the AwesomeBar, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you're looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by frecency (an algorithm combining frequency + recency). Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page's favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display."


* disable plugins from the Add-ons dialog. That means you can now disable Flash or the Windows Media Player plugin directly from Firefox, without having to install extensions like FlashBlock.

* if the current web page uses OpenSearch to point to a search engine, Firefox shows a blue circle next to the search box. You can add the search engine to your list using only two clicks.

* you can add web applications as handlers for protocols like mailto. That means you can open all the mail links in Gmail without installing an extension if you follow these instructions. Hopefully, in the next version of Firefox you'll be able to also open other kinds of links in web applications (for example, open PDF files in PDFMeNot).

* set permissions for individual web sites: for example, you can disable images or cookies in some web sites you don't trust. Opera offers more fine-grained options in "edit site preferences", but you may still find useful the limited permissions from Firefox (Tools > Page Info > Permissions tab).

* another feature already available in Opera, full-page zoom, has been included in Firefox 3 to allow the scaling of images and other objects. To revert to the zooming feature from Firefox 2, enable View > Zoom > Zoom text only.

Even if Mozilla didn't release the final version, Firefox 3 RC1 is an almost-final version and could safely replace Firefox 2. There's also an unofficial portable version you can use before installing the application. While not all the extensions have been updated to include support for Firefox 3, you can easily disable the compatibility checking.

All in all, Firefox 3 added some cool features, but it didn't ignore fundamental issues like performance or a better back-end for web history and bookmarks. The new interface and the sometimes-not-so-awesome bar are two of the things that still have rough edges.

23 comments:

  1. where you got Google Toolbar 4 for FF?

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  2. extensions.checkCompatibility not available in FF3 RC1

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  3. Obviously, "Google Toolbar 4" = "Google Toolbar 4 for Internet Explorer".

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  4. Blah, blah, blah - until Google Toolbar works for me on FF3 (which Ubuntu chose for 8.04, even though it was still in beta) it is majorly broken for me.

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  5. WEIRD! You're talking about FF3 and Google Toolbar version 4 for Internet Explorer.

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  6. Wow, I follow Fx pretty closely but I didn't know several of these tips.

    BTW, disabling extension compatibility risks de-stabilizing the entire app and sometimes has security problems. It's only meant for developers.

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  7. Still waiting for Google Browser Sync to work in FF3...
    It's a must-have for me. Hope they make it compatible with the new version.

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  8. Hmm... but about 64 bit linux and flash... dont work :(

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  9. Anyone else having troubles with Facebook's 'add as a friend' functionality?

    Just reformatted and installed FF3 and am getting that issue.

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  10. @axet: You have to add it new, its not there orginally.

    Another great feature is the password save alert is replaced with a bar, and you should check out mozilla prism, which is now a extension but will later be added by default.

    If only google would make gears compatible with FF3... I have been using FF3 from the first beta, but now I have to use a special firefox 2 profile for gears...

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  11. Google Toolbar is one of the extensions that don't work even if you disable compatibility check, but many others work (for example, Greasemonkey).

    I mentioned Google Toolbar 4 for IE in the post because it was the first that added one-click-bookmarking, a feature that was later included in Google Toolbar 3 for Firefox and now in Firefox 3.

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  12. There is also a RC of Greasemonkey (see here) which is Firefox 3 RC1 compatible, so you can use Greasemonkey without having to disable the compatibility checking

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  13. i think it is better to wait for the final release and go with that; beta,rc1,rc2 versions always have issues that in the cost the enduser time

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  14. @Schlomo Pryimak I have been using the Foxmarks extension in place of Google's Browswer sync. It works very well and I have 4 different computers all sync'd. Foxmarks is already FF3 RC1 compatile too. http://www.foxmarks.com/

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  15. I use Google Send-to-Phone which is not FF3 compatible - insecure.
    Had to define a couple of boolean values in about:config set them to false, then deinstalled the add-on and reinstalled.

    Will just have to be very careful about what I install from now on. If that add-on ever gets updated, will deinstall, set my booleans to true and reinstall. Meanwhile,it works.

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  16. the address bar auto-completes URLs and page titles, while trying to prioritize web pages visited frequently and recently

    Opera supports this too since verion 9.5, first alpha released around Sept of 2007.

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  17. " Hmm... but about 64 bit linux and flash... dont work :( "
    Bull. It's called nspluginwrapper. Any 32bit plugin works in 64bit Firefox just dandy.

    And I'm 99% sure that first one (selecting two separate chunks at once using ^) has always been there.

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  18. Is there any way to disable the Awesomebar? On some of the archaic machines that I'm running this browser on it really gives them the hiccups pulling from tags, titles, frequency, and recency. But in all other areas FF3 is a massive improvement. The Awesomebar just isn't always so Awesome.

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  19. To disable Awesomebar, try the Oldbar extension.

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  20. I love new version of FF. Few interesting FF3 features and shortcuts are at : http://i-stuff.blogspot.com/2008/06/cool-features-in-firefox-3.html

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  21. Google toolbar loses the ability to sign-in for FF3 if you turn off 3rd-party cookies. If you want them off, put google.com in the allowed list for cookies (not obvious that this allows 3rd-party ones, but it does).

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  22. @Solburn: I will try it, thanks :) I don't know which part of the browser it syncs, but the more the better.

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