Digging into Firefox 3 and its features

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Being a Firefox addon developer I tend to spend quite a major part of my time online keeping an eye on Mozilla news and developer forums. And now with Firefox 3 beta1 release out for download I couldn't wait to install and take a first-hand experience. While developers can find a lot of comprehensive info at the Burning Edge and Firefox 3.0b1 release notes I'd like to take this opportunity to document my findings for the ease of the end-users.

Generally betas are followed by a 'release candidate' followed by the final release. In the case of Firefox 2, the final release was the same as the release candidate. Also in the case of Firefox 2 there were quite a few cosmetic changes which made me uneasy initially.

I started by downloading and installing the Firefox 3.0b1 (ver. 3 beta 1). I'm reluctant to install betas on my production machine so I took my laptop and begun by clean installing Vista to prepare for Firefox beta. I was a relief to see that Firefox 3 beta1 can be parallelly installed with the current release of Firefox. I chose to do a custom installation (as I need the DOM Inspector to poke around the interface looking for UI changes). There was no option for installing the quality feedback agent as was expected to avoid people sending crash reports off a beta version. The install went into C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 1\.

Firefox3 Digging into Firefox 3 and its features

On the first run it showed the first run page(s). It looked pretty stripped-off and basic (considering that there were no themes or addons installed). What surprised me was that there were no UI (user interface) changes apparent at the first glance. I checked again and then did find a few. The first one was the start icon right next to the location bar along-side the 'go' button. On the bookmarks-toolbar you would find the 'Places' folder. I peeked into the menus looking for any new items. None. "Cool. There must be one at least in options", I thought. At the bottom of the main screen I found a new addition of a buttom to manage the add-ons which opened the extension manager. In the content section the 'File Types' section has been replaced by 'Languages' section. The 'Feeds' option has been replaced by the 'Applications' item which can be used to configure feeds and content types. 'Languages' section from 'General' under 'Advanced' has been moved to 'content' tab.

"All right. That looks like it.", I thought aloud. Guess I was wrong. There are subtle yet significant changes in this version. Here's what I dug up.

The favicon to the left of the location bar has come alive. You click it and you can find out more about the site. It contains a 'more about this site…' link which opens up a dialog with various sections which you could really dig deep to find detailed site info, even the media the site contains. Taking this a step further is the permissions tab which would let you configure site-specific permissions for loading images, allowing pop-ups, cookies and installing extensions or themes. You could view individual cookies and view the stored passwords for this site. That gives you the authority of a cop or a detective to investigate around to find the culprit to a possible issue.
The star icon to the right of the location bar is not a 'flag-this-site-for-inappropriate-content' button. It's a (surprise surprise) bookmark button. Well it actually makes it's place into the 'Places' feature new to this version. Read more at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places. In short Places is a new system to improve access to history and bookmarks.
The resizer separating the locatin bar and the search bar. You hover your mouse over it and your mouse turns into a resizer which would allow you to resize the location bar and the search bar. That's easier than modifying the userchrome.css for making such changes.
The menus have the native look and feel of Vista menus.

Let's check out the performance

I restarted Firefox and opened up a webpage. I opened up the same site in IE7 as well. Here's the memory consumption:
Firefox stood consiming 40,572kb while IE7 stood at 7716kb. On opening up another 6 sites Firefox was at 60192kb and IE7 at 55772kb.

I've seen comparisons being done with Firefox 2 and people claiming that Firefox 3 starts up faster than Firefox 2 did. But I guess this comparison is quite subjective. Most of the people use a lot of add-ons and themes. And when they install a new version and start it into a clean profile, it does give an impression of a lightening fast browser. Firefox is impressive and commands a lot of respect amongst the other browsers but they are the unprofessionally programmed addons which lead to memory leaks and performance issues. The specs of my machine are quite satisfying with 4GB ram and a dual core processor running Vista so the difference in the startup times is not apparent but with sufficient experimentation (available online) it can pe proved that the startup time is significantly improved as is the stability over memory leaks. With Mozilla mentioning over 300 individual memory leaks fixed and with the introduction of the new XPCOM cycle collector which eliminated more. Rendering speed is further enhanced thanks to the new Gecko 1.9 laout rendering engine.

But that's not the end. There's more. The zoom function has been improved to magnify the images (and the entire page layout) as it does the text. The download manager is searchable and you could search for files which you have downloaded from within Firefox. And while we are at it, the downloads can be resumed after a browser restart. The buggy "Open in tabs" feature has been fixed to not to overwrite the old tabs. The autocomplete feature of the location bar now shows results from the history URL and also with the page titles. The Bookmark organizer is better and offers a preview of the bookmark selected and may require a few minutes to get used to it.

For the more technically oriented I can't resist to break this open - rgba and hsla color schemes are now supported. And for the web developers (my most awaited feature) - cross-site XMLHttpRequest.

Bottom Line

Firefox 3 is Firefox in a new avatar. Do not expect eye candy but performance. Firefox 3 is supposed to be a rock solid and steady browser which will keep you computer, data and online transaction secure. It will let you browse the web effectively and let you tag, bookmark, store and find information quickly. With effective redesign to the browser core for performance, security and stability this is going to remain the flagship Mozilla product. But you definitely want to await for the final release version as not many extensions are compatible with it at the moment. Stay tuned to more on Firefox