Loading ...Firefox 3 RC 1 full review
Web experience
Firefox can save site specific preferences. For example you could allow just some pages to use AJAX, set a specific spell checker language, images, etc. Firefox 3 will remember the zoom level you have applied for a certain site and will zoom automatically the next time you visit it.
Net protocols (like irc, news, webcal and mailto) and certain documents handling can be passed to web services. For example, Yahoo Mail or Gmail may become your default application for mailto: links. For this, the previous web feeds page has been extended to the Options window for all content and protocols. Firefox 3 recognizes podcasts and video podcast feeds from regular ones so you can specify a different application for each.
Media feeds are displayed with a link to the media file in feed preview mode.
The option to allow third party cookies has been restored as it was in Firefox 1.5 and previous.
Search engines
The search engine manager lets you set and change keywords for search engines. With keywords, if you associate the w keyword with Wikipedia (now a default search engine), you could enter w hawaii in the location bar and search Wikipedia for Hawaii.
Downloads
One of the most requested features: downloads can be paused and resumed across sessions, limited only by the server capabilities. Also, on Windows, downloaded files are automatically passed to the installed anti-virus if present and Windows Vista parental controls are honored.
As seen in previous betas, the Download Manager has received a serious face lift as an easier to track download list that you can search by file name, size and download date. It’s also possible to select multiple items to open their containing folder, delete, cancel or retry them in a single click.
A status bar notification provides summarized status of current downloads. You can click it to open the Download Manager.
Add-ons
The Add-ons Manager has been integrated with Mozilla Add-ons, Mozilla’s official extensions and themes repository, providing recommendations, search, rating and add-ons install without leaving Firefox.
And a new Plugins page (identified with a neat Lego brick icon) allows easy plugin enabling and disabling, making the Add-ons Manager a powerful control panel for Firefox enhancements.
When installing, updating, disabling or enabling back an add-on, an information bar is displayed to remind a restart is needed for changes to apply, and a restart button.
Plus, just installed themes are automatically selected so Firefox uses it after the next restart.
Among other minor tweaks: FTP and gopher listings get a better styled and functional page where the list can be sorted by name, size and date by clicking the appropriate header.
When accessing advanced preferences (about:config), a warning is displayed.
Security
In the security front, Firefox will check visited sites with a list of known malware sites -provided by stopbadware.org and served by Google- to prevent spyware, rootkits, viruses, dialers and other kinds of malware from even being offered to you.
A rewritten password manager now unobtrusively prompts to store an entered password in the information bar and after trying a logon so you know if it is the correct one or not and avoid cluttering autocomplete lists.
Identifying authentic sites and avoiding fake ones is now easier. The new site button, just next to the web address, provides details about the identity of the current web site. While the largest part of the web has no verified identity, financial institutions and similar usually do and it makes the site button in the location bar to change color and size so you can know with a glimpse.
As great as add-ons are they are can also become a liability and an attack vector. To mitigate this, Firefox 3 requires add-ons updates to occur over an encrypted connection (to block malicious sites purporting the update site) or the add-on developer to sign it with a digital signature so updates can be verified to be from the same source. This will prevent middle-man attacks where bad guys could fake an update site address to serve malicious software.
Invalid or expired web site certificates now get an unfriendly treatment that requires adding the site to a white list. This should encourage web site owners to keep their certificates up to date so they can effectively ensure their visitors a more secure experience.
Under the hood
The list of changes for Gecko is not short either and benefit not only Firefox but all “powered by Mozilla” products including Thunderbird, Flock, SeaMonkey, Joost, Miro, Songbird and more.
Since Alpha 1, Firefox 3 passes the Acid2 test, a popular test of a browser styling standard compatibility. IN the Acid3 test Firefox 3 scores 71, behind Opera and WebKit (Safari engine) development releases which achieved both 100% a few weeks ago. While the value of the Acid3 test was questioned recently by Mozilla’s Mike Shaver, in practice, Firefox was just too close to release by the time the Acid3 test came out to aim to pass it.
Firefox 3 supports color profiles embedded on pictures and images to better replicate the original environment conditions as light and focus, thanks to new color management. It is however disabled by default to prevent unintended behaviors like background and foreground images not matching because color profiles were not considered.
It is possible to select discontinuous pieces of text and images for better control of what you copy or print from a web page.
A biggie: full page zoom can optionally magnify the complete page or just the text, as in previous versions. This is a much requested feature and a must for Mozilla plans for a Mobile Firefox. By default it will zoom the full page contents but it can be restricted to text only through the View menu.
Web developers can mark certain web page components such as images and scripts to be available while offline. In practice you could be able to compose emails or write documents though a web service while disconnected from the Internet. You will have to authorize an application to save content to your computer and can also control how much space can offline applications use.
For JavaScript developers, some interesting tricks: the ability to load local files for local use, native JSON support and most notably, FUEL, a library of Firefox programming interfaces that will ease the development of new extensions and ensure better practices (such as memory management) for common Firefox tasks.
Cross site AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) support was removed in Beta 5 because the specifications changed in the process and Mozilla prefers to avoid an incompatible implementation.
Support for editable content, so a user can change portions of a web page marked by the author.
A new spell checker: The MySpell spell-checking engine has been replaced with Hunspell which does a better job handling complex languages including Asian, Hungarian, Basque, etc.
Real full screen is now available. In the past, the full screen mode left the navigation and tab bars visible at all times. Now they are displayed for just a second before sliding under the top edge.
For Gecko 1.9, Mozilla switched to open source Cairo (1.6) rendering engine for better rendering performance. The change also enables easy PDF printing capabilities but it is only possible through an extension right now though.
More beautiful animated images are possible with animated PNGs (APNG): a full 16 million color palette and partial transparency will hopefully sweep GIF images in the future. While APNG was rejected as a standard PNG extension last year, Opera has announced it will support the format in future versions.
Proprietary TalkBack, the tool for reporting crashes to Mozilla included with Firefox and Thunderbird, has been replaced with open source Breakpad (formerly Airbag).
Users can see their submitted crashes entering about:crashes in the location bar.
The End
In theory, nothing is left to be done as it is a release candidate. In practice, it’s possible some bug may be found out that may require a second or more release candidate as it has been the case on all previous Firefox release.
It also seems, Yahoo! was the only web mail service to provide the necessary interfaces to use it as mailto: protocol handler. Gmail and Live will certainly be missed but they should be easy to add as they become available.
At this stage it also expected that most extension developers will get back to work to make their pieces compatible with Firefox 3. The ongoing Extend Firefox 3 contest (now with a music category) provides additional motivation.
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May 17th, 2008 at 5:00 am
Your review has me so interested, I’m downloading now! Thanks.
-JAK
May 17th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Why do you copy/paste you old posts all the time ?
That’s not what we call a “review”…
Percy CabelloMay 17th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Oh, it isn’t obvious? Because most of the details about some features doesn’t change, and there’s no point in writing the same stuff over and over again. I usually update the screenshot so they remain current, add new features, remove backed out ones, consolidate changes, etc.
Even doing that it took about four hours to me to update this review and the “what’s new” post.
May 17th, 2008 at 5:29 am
Here’s a tip for shaving some time off your browsing in Firefox 3:
When typing into the location bar, use Tab, Return, to select the first suggestion in the dropdown. Much more comfortable than moving your hand and doing Down, Return.
Percy CabelloMay 17th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Good find David. It really saves a trip to the arrow keys area.
May 17th, 2008 at 7:10 am
I don’t see how Gmail can be made the default for mailing (mailto: links). I only see Yahoo and Windows Mail and no way to add new services
Percy CabelloMay 17th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Omega, Firefox 3 ships with the registerProtocolHandler() JavaScript interface that makes adding mailto or any other web protocol handles a matter of two clicks. The thing is neither Gmail not Live Mail provide a web address capable of handling mailto: links and process subject, to, and body parameters properly.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Responding to:
“Among them, profile guided optimizations (PGO) provides an optimized Firefox build based on the way it internally works. So far it is only available for Windows. Linux should follow shortly and Mac OS X could also make it before final release.”
Only Windows will have PGO. There wasn’t enough time before b5 for the other platforms and it’s not something to introduce between b5 and RC1, or RC1 and any RC2. Please update this text.
Percy CabelloMay 17th, 2008 at 10:48 am
That’s right Nick. Thanks! Updated.
May 17th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I guess here’s as good a place to ask as any (correct me if I’m wrong, please):
I am an extensive user of Del.icio.us (we’re talking 10’s of thousands of bookmarks), and really really want to use the bookmarks functionality from within Firefox. However, it only seems to find tags that have already sync’ed, and the bottom right corner always just says “Bookmark synching in progress…”
Given my high usage and the apparent snail’s-pace synching, am I doomed to forever be dissatisfied with this one little (but critical) piece of functionality, or have other users run into this too and have a better suggestion?
May 17th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
The duplicate tabs feature doesn’t seem to work on RC1 on Mac.
May 17th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
One of the most interesting features for us non-native English speakers is the site specific spell checking. The problem is I can’t find it. I have the en-US and the sv-SE dictionaries installed, but I can’t find the setting. I thought I would find it in the Page Info window, but nope. Is that feature dropped or am I stupid? :)
May 17th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Waiting for updates to a lot of my extensions now :-( Updated a bit too soon I guess. Bye StumbleUpon, bye TwitterFox :-(
May 17th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Please… I was expecting that when I install RC1, the real player browser record plugin would work but it says “not compatible with firefox 3″ can someone knows… please if it didn’t work on firefox 3 then using firefox would be of no use for me…
May 17th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Is the “site specific preferences” mentioned at the top of Page 2 documented anywhere? Is it View Page Info that you’re talking about? I’m thinking it’s some other interface, because the items mentioned are not accessible there, though some other things are. Why wouldn’t they all be in the same place?
May 17th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I was able to install the betas as a separate version and keep FF2 and the fully functioning add-ons. The RC overwrote FF2. This left me without some handy add-ons. Easy enough to uninstall, reinstall FF2 and regain everything. I would guess this is by design.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Most of the must have pluggins wont install in this new version, so i still using v2 only.
Plz rectify this and i am much awaiting to upgrade.
Long Live Mozilla.
-
Mahesh
Bangalore
India
DavidMay 18th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Same here Mahesh.
Not giving up FireShot or Flashblock.
To bad, because they worked in Foxfire 3 beta 5.
Like the true Full Screen in 3 rc1 though.
May 18th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
“IN the Acid3 test Firefox 3 scores 71, behind Opera and WebKit (Safari engine) development releases which achieved both 100% a few weeks ago” - note that both Opera and WebKit presented *experimental* versions to pass Acid3. Opera is certainly not going to pass Acid3 in their next release (Opera 9.5), not sure about WebKit. So this is a pretty unfair comparison, Firefox 3 is way ahead any released browser (including Firefox 2).
May 19th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
First thanks percy for the new look of your site… it is now much cool…
I want to talk about the TAB BUTTON - it would have been great if FF3 had tab button right at the TAB BAR… It could be easier and fast to open new tabs… like the opera browser has it… the beauty of firefox is tab browsing, how could mozilla didn’t think about this… clicking on tab button from the navigation bar is much confusing as it has other mostly used buttons there…
Also whenever firefox crashes or the light is out, my all cache also gets deleted… it’s so frustrating in that case… I had hoped that FF3 would have session saving functionality like the opera browser has it built in… which allows to save the opened tabs and get them back at any time later… I had read at pcmag or other site that there is a firefox extension which allows us to save current tabs and get it back the same later… mozilla why didn’t they thought about this… otherwise Firefox is the best of all…
garret
kathmandu, Nepal
May 19th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I despise it Why is there not an OPTION to turnoff bookmarks in the address bar? In the blogs there is more than enough complaints about this; that there should be no reason that the option to turn this off should have not been in RC1. Mozilla ignoring this complaint? Is it too much to ask to have the damn OPTION TO TURN OFF THIS??? AGAIN MOZILLA WHY ARE YOU IGNORING THIS COMPLAINT?????
David NaylorMay 20th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
If you complain in the right place maybe someone will start listening…
May 20th, 2008 at 2:05 am
you can re-enable extensions made incompatable by the upgrade by installing this extension Nightly Tester Tools.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6543
you can also edit the extension code, changing the version range to include the latest firefox. this may not work with all extensions. this article runs through some more hacks and tips to re-enable and edit.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/how_to_fix_broken_firefox_extensions
May 21st, 2008 at 6:26 am
I wish there is a function that can “move tab to new window”…
May 25th, 2008 at 6:52 am
About the new location bar you say: “Once you get used to it, there is no turning back.”
The sad thing is that there is no turning back if you like it or not. The search algorithm does not return any results I want. I’ve tried to get used to it since beta 3, but it simply does not work for me (any many others). This feature really should be configurable.
I’m not switching to Firefox 3 until this is fixed.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Firefox 3 RC 1 (build ID 2008051206) crashes on websites with AJAX and Flash, almost 2-3 times an hour. Visit chess.com, especially the Vote Chess games, and you won’t last long.
Every crash report centers around an exception access violation in arena_dalloc_small. Anyone else getting this?
robJune 3rd, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Yep ………..same crash issues with Gmail and other Ajax sites. Not quite ready for prime time!!