Firefox 3: A Quick Tour
Firefox 3 has been released yesterday – and all the download servers have been overloaded in just a few minutes. If you haven’t already downloaded the overhauled browser, you can do so here. Just in case you’re wondering why you should upgrade I’ll present a few good reasons. The new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine and quite a lot of tweaks contribute to significant performance gains, i. e., it launches and runs much faster. The JavaScript interpreter works faster too, and the browser delivers an improved memory handling. The new address bar, now dubbed Smart Location Bar, makes it easier to find the sites you recently visited, and allows for a better bookmarks handling. The Bookmark Manager is now called Places Organizer and is more intelligent than ever before. Finally, the Download and Add-On Mangers have become more powerful too. There are more features, of course, but these are the most important to me.
After installing it, I tried to get all my plug-ins to work. Luckily, ever extension I have in use has already been upgraded to work with version 3.0 of Firefox, which has been in development for roughly 3 years. By the way, version 3.1 is already in the works and should be released at the end of the year. It will incorporate a few features that didn’t make it into Firefox 3.0. As I was writing, every extension was available for the new version – save one: Mouse Gestures, one of my favorites. A fast search on Google provided a solution to this particular dilemma – Mouse Gestures Redox.