Paul Richards

The latest version of Mozilla Firefox is due to be released later early next week on the 17th June 2008. I’ve been participating in the pre-release testing and cant say enough good points about it. If it wasn’t for incompatibility for certain addons I use (namely firebug) I would of switched to it weeks ago. Now RC3 has been released compatibility for popular addons such as foxmarks and firebug are now available.

So why should I bother downloading (7 Mb) and installing FF3?

As you’ve all probably already read on the web site FF3 has major security, performance, improved password management, anti virus integration & a download manager just to name a few.

What interest me is features that ultimately change the way we surf the web and interact with our web browser. FF3 takes two classic old web browsing features; bookmarks (favourites) and history and gives them a new lease of life. If you like me i’ve really used the history because its always been pretty inaccessible to search. I use bookmarks but can never find anything in them and normally just re-search it on Google.

FF3 provides loads of new tools and features to sort, search and tag bookmarks. The best feature is what they call ‘Location bar & auto-complete’. This is a Google suggest inspired search tool that help you to quickly locate that missing bookmark or that pages you know you were once on.

As you can see its clear and indicates if its a current bookmark or not by the star on the right. It has a sort of Facebook search look about it that highlights the matched letter(s) in bold.

There are massive improvements that make upgrading more then worth you while. Firefox RC3.