Without letting any of my excitement down, I am going to tell you the amazing things that I found in Firefox 3. First of all the startup time of Firefox 3 is much quicker than Firefox 2. The next things which strikes as it starts is its appearance. I have fallen in love with the two little glowy buttons for back and forward browsing.

Now We Have The Awesomebar!

The show stealer of the entire futuristic parade of Firefox 3 is its address bar or awesomebar. Its awesome in its true sense. You wouldn’t even have imagined that the lame old address bar can sometimes mean so much than just typing in URL’s. With this revolutionary address bar in Firefox 3 you would soon forget having to remember URL’s.

Yes, you don’t have to remember those lengthy creepy URL’s once you have Firefox 3 in your control. The address bar is so smart it can detect  the correct URL when you just type in the actual keywords which had made you open that page. For example, if you had opened a page which contained some information on “Firefox” and later on forgot which URL you had opened, just type in “Firefox” and the page URL would prompt up the list with “Firefox” highlighted. Incredible I must say.

You may be guessing already what makes it so smart?  Well, from the past, Firefox has been keeping a store of the web page titles by caching in the URL’s you were opening up. But until the launch of Firefox 3, it was never used to good effect. Now in the new version, it makes a really good use of these title’s. Its a high probability that you would remember something in the page titles if you want to get back to the page you had visited earlier. So, its likely that instead of putting in the actual URL you would be putting the right keywords, and the right keywords are always present in? You guessed it right, in the page title of the page. This trick, has really transformed the address bar into Awesomebar.

The Amazing Download Manager

It was a lenghty wait and now the wait has been sweetly fulfilled by the Firefox 3 team. The much needed pause and resume feature of the download bar actually works in Firefox 3. Earlier, even though this feature was present, it lacked proper functioning and so you couldn’t rely on your resuming the downloads. But this time works. Yeehaa! With the amazing Download Manager you can again visit the page from where you had downloaded the file and also if you haven’t cleared the list you can search for the downloads.

I would expect the next version to have multiple simultaneous connections so that I would not have to use Flashget.

The Amazing Addon Manager

This is another show stealer after the Awesomebar. Remember those good old times when you wanted to add you favorite addons, you first searched Google or the addon’s page of Mozilla. Then you used to go to the page to read about the addon, see the ratings and then actually download the addon. Zip forward to Firefox 3, the good old days will become more better with the new addon manager. It’s got an inbuilt search engine which displays not only the relevant addon’s based on the search criteria but also the description which you would have seen on the actual addon page and it also shows you the rating! It was unbelievable for me when I saw this in action.

To be true the when I said that my behavior has changed from the instance I downloaded Firefox 3, the feature which made it happen, was the Addon Manager. I have stopped being lazy in searching addons, and since I have an embedded search option, I have started to download addons like crazy. Its driving me mad. In just a day I have found so many amazing addon’s that had made my web browsing experience much much richer. I would put up a post soon for telling you about the addons which are my favorites.

Firefox 3 is a browser that you must not wait for downloading. The record of 8 million Firefox 3 downloads in just 24 hours is enough to prove this. The world is waiting for more. So without wasting much time, grab it here fast!

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Firefox has released the full feature release candidate which is said to be quite stable, but its not yet the final release. From what the bloggers have been publishing about this release candidate it seems quite evident that the features are simply eye popping. The major surprise comes in the form of a fast browser loaded with features. One thing the Mozilla guys have stuck to their mission, is improving the browser speed and load capabilities. From the reports on comparisons of the performance of various browsers Firefox 3 has passed out with flying colors. Also the new version sports a more native look and feel of the underlying OS. This means, but obviously, that, you must switch over to Firefox 3 once it releases.

If you are thinking that a speedier browser owes to compromises on its feature set, then Firefox 3 is all set to prove you wrong. The earlier much wanted features are already there. In fact, they have been upgraded to a marvelous level. If you loved the last update in the clubbing of add-on and themes manager, this time they have put in a search right within it! Believe it or not, Firefox 3 will allow searching for plugins and themes right through your add-on/ theme manager.

If you are indeed a hard core surfer then you must be having loads of bookmarks stacked up in your folders of the Firefox bookmark manager. But if you always thought that tagging was a feature required to quickly access the bookmarks then you thought it right. Firefox 3 has upgraded its bookmark manager and made it “places organizer“. With the new organizer, you can now tag your bookmarks along with some nifty smart searches and time line ordering of bookmarks.

One of the most difficult things to work within Firefox 2 is the download manager. When I download a particular thing I always save it to a different location. But later on, I always tend to forget the location where I had downloaded it from because of my frequent downloading habits. Firefox 3 is going to be a major upgrade for me in this aspect, since it includes a download manager which shows the link where the download came from. It also would be supporting resume states in event of a system crash. I am not sure if this, because till now my resumes have never worked, especially in Firefox 2. But I am being confident this time around.

Besides the above major upgrades, they also have made many other tweaks, which include, their password remembering prompt. It is not obtrusive any longer with the popup every time you try to log in. This time, it allows remembering only those passwords when you actually log in, which means, no storing of wrong passwords.

Firefox 3 is about to arrive. I am excited and absolutely thrilled about it. Its gonna be a wild ride yet again. Gear up!

Images Courtesy: Lifehacker

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The bookmarking sites are fast enough to load on entering its URL. But it is somewhat distracting to get to the required article or site by getting redirected from the bookmarking site. This is the time where the browsers URL history comes in to utmost important. And it is not a small feature to be missed out on. For me, it is THE most important feature.

An Example

For a small depiction, some URL’s like the admin interface of this site is not something I would like to bookmark nor the subscriber dashboard of feedburner and not even the statistics page from my webhost. I need them regularly and thats why I thank the browser implementation of caching recently accessed URL’s. I am a Firefox lover and here I would like to mention how Firefox scores over Internet Explorer (IE) when it comes to accessing your history URL’s with ease.

How Firefox Beats IE

It wasn’t until recently that I noticed the manner in which Firefox helps me access my history URL’s. When I type in the first letter of the site I want to visit it not only shows me list of links but the first link is always the one which I want to visit right now. I wondered to myself as to how Firefox understood where I wanted to go, at that particular moment of time. If there are 100 of sites starting with the letter “T” which I had visited in the past, sorting all these sites alphabetically, my site “TechTracer” would have ended up somewhere in the middle of the list of links. But Firefox always shows me the first link as “TechTracer”.

You would find this happening to you too but its so smalll and we are so busy that it might have gone unnoticed. However when I used IE, the thing always annoyed me that the link I was trying to reach from history always remained hidden in the list and is not shown as the first link as Firefox does. This is the point where FireFox makes a subtle yet amazing exploration at usability. And mind you, it is the most amazing yet simple concept.

The secret is simple. Firefox knows that if you have visited any URL more number of times than any other then it assumes that probably you would be visiting the same URL once again. Lo and behold! the next time you are in the thought of visiting the site then Firefox promptly displays you that URL as the first one in the list of links. It actually saves your precious time to browse through the long list. Similarly the other links in the list are also sorted according to their frequency of access.

Try this out in Internet Explorer. And you would see that IE stores the URL history sorted alphabetically and leaves you at the peril of finding yourself the link that you were interested in. FireFox is currently light years ahead of IE in terms of usability and such simple features sometimes makes me wonder at the ability of the product development team to take care of the minimalist of the surfer’s behavior.

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Piclens is a slideshow presenter for convenient viewing of websites which have stack loads of photos. You name it, Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Picasa Web Albums and any other. You may have never witnessed such a slideshow before within a browser. When you install this plugin and browse any of the above site, the pictures get a tiny play button displayed on the bottom. The instant you hit this play button your get transferred into wonderland. Believe me, its true.

Piclens has been developed by the same people who gave us the yet another amazing plugin, CoolIris. Its usage is very simple. Install, restart Firefox and hover on to an image heavy site and click play button. For example, visit my Flickr photostream and hover your mouse over any of the pictures. Your would notice the play button and when its clicked your browser will be transformed into a full screen slideshow presenter as shown below:

However, there are two glitches. One which would dampen this eye catching effect is your bandwidth. Try it, only if you have loads of it. Another is, this plugin works on Firefox only if your platform is Windows. So Linux guys will probably have to wait for it for some time.

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The things to which I appreciate in the new Firefox is the session storage. It’s of a tremendous usage in daily works that if ever your browser were to close down somehow either due to an abnormal shutdown your session would be restored the next time you open your browser. It means that now, you dont have to bear the brunt if ever you forgot to bookmark a page if you have opened it and in case your system crashed or you wear typing out some details in a form when the firefox got restarted. The next time you open your browser all tabs with all the information filled in the forms would be restored.

The best thing of Firefox 2.0 is about Google Suggest being embedded into the small search bar at the top. It gives you a list of frequently searched keywords based on the keys you input into it. The search is done realtime as you type. This applies to other search engines as well as stated in their release notes. Feeds user’s like me have plenty of options in Firefox 2.0 as it gives you option to directly store the feed in Google Reader, My Yahoo or Bloglines in addition to the Live Bookmarks as in the earlier Firefox versions.

Firefox is now shipped with an inbuilt spell checker for forms. Whenever you type any kind of information in a form Firefox checks the spelling and underlines whenever it finds a wrong word. You don’t have to do the spell checking from the site’s spell checker or any of the tools. This utility saves a lot of your time while typing as you are alerted as you keep typing.

Firefox 2.0 supported all the extensions I already had in v 1.5 and now it has combined the earlier “Extensions” and “Themes” dialogs to a single dialog box called “Add-ons” which is more convenient to work with. The add-ons range is so very vaste that using Firefox 2.0 is like having the best time of your internet browsing experience. Ill be soon writing a post about my favorite add-ons sometimes later. Keep watching my space!!

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