Firefox 3

So, I downloaded Firefox 3 last night – and I am very impressed. There are already over 6.2 million downloads!

I also got a certificate to prove I downloaded Firefox :P

A quick overview of the biggest changes:

1. The Address Bar – There is now a search-as-you-type capability, that searches through your history and bookmarks. Quite useful in cases where you only remember part of the URL and/or page title.
2. User Interface – There are a few changes to the actual look of FireFox 3, the most predominant one being the new back & forward icons.
3. Improved SVG Support (Scalable Vectors Graphics) – Faster rendering of SVG graphics, as well as the support for new elements and filters. Examples of SVG Graphics can be found here.
4. Animated PNG Support – Unfortunately, APNG is only supported by Firefox 3 and Opera 3.5. A suitable APNG, below, shows FireFox taking over the world. If you are viewing this in IE (die), or FireFox 2, you will see the static FireFox logo.

   

5. Javascript – FireFox 3 now supports Javascript 1.8. Extremely quick Javascript execution.
6. Support for Offline Applications – Too much to say, this warrants a post on its own :)
7. Performance – FireFox now opens and closes much faster. Definite speed increase in Ajax sites (Gmail etc)
8. Improved Memory Management – Pretty self-explanatory. For a detailed look at the improvements, see here.
9. CSS Improvements – Many CSS bugs have been squashed. Support for additional features (such as ­ (soft-hyphen), text-rendering etc) have been added.
10. Add-ons Manager – You are now able to install add-ons from this interface; no need to visit the add-ons site.
11. Download Manager – Improved ability to pause and resume downloads, even if you closed Firefox in the meantime. The Download Manager is also integrated with your anti-virus application, automatically scanning all downloaded files.

So, make sure you download FireFox 3 :-)

~Haydndup