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.

Now for a few per­for­mance tweaks. I do have a user.js file because that’s how I make sure that my Fire­fox instal­la­tions on dif­fer­ent com­put­ers really are the same. In addi­tion, I only have to make a backup of this file and most of the set­tings are safe: in case of an upgrade (I always do a clean install) or if I have to for­mat my PC that’s one file to copy. Any­way, there are a few lines I had to add to my exist­ing file:

user_pref("browser.urlbar.search.chunkSize", 500);  // Default: 1000
user_pref("browser.urlbar.search.timeout", 50);     // Default: 100

These two pref­er­ences made the drop-down menu offered by the Smart Loca­tion bar more respon­sive. With the orig­i­nal set­tings I expe­ri­enced a small lag when open­ing the menu.

user_pref("browser.urlbar.maxRichResults", 12);

This pref­er­ence con­trols how many items are shown in the drop-down menu. 12 is the default, by the way.

user_pref("ui.submenuDelay", 0);

Here’s the delay between hov­er­ing over a menu option with a sub­menu and the sub­menu appear­ing spec­i­fied in mil­lisec­onds. I don’t like delays there.

user_pref("browser.blink_allowed", false);

Blink­ing ele­ments? Never gonna hap­pen with this line.

user_pref("browser.fullscreen.animateUp", 0);

Fire­fox 3 now auto­mat­i­cally hides tool­bars and the tab­strip when enter­ing full screen mode. When these ele­ments are hid­den for the first time, they slowly slide upwards until you can see them no more. That’s annoy­ing and with this line you’ll never gonna see it slide away. Move your mouse to the top of the screen to get the tool­bars back.

Of coure, there are many more set­tings to play with. If you want to play a lit­tle more with them, you should head over to Mozilla’s Knowl­edge Base, where a lot of them are explained in more detail.