Harry Pears

At last, I have been meaning to write this for the last six days, but have only just got around to doing so.

After having Firefox 3 since Beta 5, the new features were of no surprise to me on download day, however that doesn’t mean to say that I wasn’t pleased on June 17th when I downloaded the open-source beast 2 hours and 20 minutes after it was officially released. You are probably aware of why it took me so long to access Mozilla’s site, and if you aren’t, then I will now tell you. Traffic. At around 1800UTC, Mozilla’s servers went down for 16 minutes, download day was delayed, and thousands of people were trying to access the site only to get a lovely error message. However, I asked my dad to see if he could get onto the download page, and he managed to start the download after his second refresh of the page. Ironically, he uses IE =P

Anyway, onto the main part of this post. Firefox three is so much better than FF2, and that was good. One of my favourite new features is the ‘AwesomeBar’. Basically, the location bar now searches history (which now goes back three months, I read this- have not checked), bookmarks and displays the favicon, title and URL of sites which match the criteria typed into the location bar. If however, you do not like this feature (you must be crazy), then it can be disabled by an addon, or by changing something in about:config.

Firefox 3 Awesome Bar as shown in Ubuntu 8.04

Another cool feature in FF3 is the quicker bookmarking system. By simply clicking on a small star in the location bar, you can bookmark a site. With a second click, you can then change details, save location, tags etc. The tags are also very helpful, by tagging bookmarks, it makes them more accessible. You can simply type the tag into the AwesomeBar, and results with that tag will appear.

Firefox 3 Add Bookmark as shown in Vista

As well as helpful features, graphical changes have been made so that Mozilla’s latest release blends in with the OS with native themes. This means that buttons, text fields, scrollbars and a range of other elements change depending on which OS Firefox is running in.

Firefox 3 depicting native themes in Vista

Firefox 3 depicting native themes in Ubuntu 8.04

According to Mozilla, its ever more popular browser has undergone 15,000 changes since Firefox 2. Many of which are not noticable changes, but improve performance of the browser. Some include faster Javascript and quicker load times than FF2.

For a full list of features, check here!

Download day was a great success, achieving over 8,000,000 downloads in the 24 hour period. These figures are being thuroughly inspected for errors, multiple downloads or canceled downloads, and the final figures should be out soon.

Currently, the browser has achieved over 18,165,131 downloads since its release last Tuesday evening. These figures keep rising rapidly, and the second country set to hit over 1,000,000 downloads of Firefox 3 looks to be Japan with over 900,000 currently.

There is not much else I have to say, other than

GetFirefox!