Fortunately Firefox

Firefox 3 is the biggest leap forward for web browsers since Firefox 1.0 was released several years ago. In fact, I think it might be the biggest improvement to the state of the art for web browsing since the beginning - back in the early 1990s.

Tagging in Firefox 3 is great. The only feature that is missing is bulk editing of tags. This is an essential feature but did ont make the Firefox 3.0 release. It had to be pushed back until Firefox 3.1. I guess that means I will not be getting that before the end of this year.

I might write my own. I studied the Places system in Firefox and read the API docs for the different services Places provides. It looks very powerful and, at the same time - very easy to use in Javascript programs.

I reckon I will probably have to create an extension in order to provide an execution environment. However, that would probably be necessary in any case. I would probably want to have a sidebar that I could use to browse and edit my tags, kind of like the one that comes with Firefox 3, but slanted just towards bulk editing bookmarks' tags.

Once you start tagging a lot you will really notice how cool the new location bar (AKA, The Awesome Bar) is.

Type words in it and they become search terms applied to all the tags, page titles, and URLs in your bookmarks. Maybe your browsing history too. Anyway, I like this feature. Some people complain it could be an embarrassment at work but c'mon, what kind of sites are you visiting then?

There is another great feature in Firefox that is somewhat related to bookmarks. They use URNs to define search criteria for dynamic bookmark lists. Think of these as "smart folders" in iTunes or in the Mac OS X Finder (desktop) if you have iTunes or a Macintosh.

I will not go into the details of that feature. If you already know what a URN is, you do not need any explanation. If you do not, then you can find explanations of it better than I could give over on the Mozilla/Firefox web site or in Wikipedia.

Firefox 3 is fast - very fast. Firefox 2 ran slower on the Mac than it did on MS-Windows. It was almost if not quite a dot compared to Safari 3. Well, now the canine costume is on the other foot. Safari 3 needs to be sped up slightly on the Mac to hold its record, I think.

That is just my subjective opinion. I saw some benchmarks this week that indicate that Safari 3 generally faster than Firefox.

Some of my favorite Firefox addons like these have not been updated to work with Firefox 3 yet:

1. Firebug
2. HTML Validator
   
3. View Source Chart
4. XForms
   

But most are already working with Firefox 3. These include:

• Adblock
• EditCSS
• ForecastFox
• Google Toolbar
• Google Notebook
• Selenium IDE
  
• Web Developer
  
• Yahoo! Toolbar
  
• Greasemonkey
  

The new features that let you see how much confidence you can have in a web site are nice. Very easy. And this sort of "transparency" for web sties to the user is long overdue! Hopefully, every browser will make it as easy as Firefox 3 to see if a site as kosher as it appears to be.

So, if you have been hanging back, waiting for other people to "check out" Firefox 3 before you upgrade - hey, it's checked out now!

If you use a Macintosh running Mac OS X, you will be really impressed with how much faster Firefox runs and how much cleaner it looks. Regardless of which operating system you run it on, you will be really happy with the new features. I cannot think of anything that got harder to do, more complicated, or slower. Things just improved across the board.

Another nice thing is that Firefox 3 uses less memory than earlier versions. It is a rare day when a program runs faster and uses less memory. But tht is the case with Firefox 3.

Come on in, the water is fine! Fast, fun, and feature-packed!

Labels: firefox