After a three-year development, Mozilla releases Firefox 3.0 next month. IE 8 is expected to be released by the end of the year, and altogether, these browsers, which share more than 90 % of the browser market, would be in for a great competition, since IE 8 is also expected to boast some cool new features (which we will look at a later post).
Firefox 3 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 web rendering engine, which was in development for more than the past two years, incorporating two millions lines of code edits and fix for more than 11,000 issues. This all-new Gecko engine will make Firefox a lot more robust and reliable. Firefox 2.0.0.14 is based on Gecko 1.8.1.
Here is a video I found about Firefox 3.0. I haven't watched it fully due to my connection problems. But I hope it will be rich with some good information. If not, please let me know by comments.
Firefox boasts these features in particular:
One click site information: You will find a favicon on the address bar of the web browser when the site is loaded, and on clicking this icon, you can get details of the site’s ownership.
Malware protection: In this, the users are warned against the site whenever they arrive at a site known to install malwares in the user machines.
Web forgery protection page: The contents of pages, which are suspicious of fraudulence such as phishing, are not at all shown when you visit them.
New SSL error page: Clearer and stricter error pages are shown when Firefox finds an invalid SSL certificate.
Add-ons and plug-in versions: Firefox will automatically check for add-ons and plug-in versions and update them, and all add-on updates will be completely secure.
Antivirus integration: As one of the greatest features of antivirus integration, Firefox alerts the antivirus in the system of the executable downloads, so that the antivirus can scan whatever is being downloaded.
Cool user friendly features
New download manager with resumable download: Here, at last a browser incorporates a resumable download manager. Never in the past was there a browser with a complete download manager. IE’s greatest weakness was a good download manager, which could resume downloads. Here, Mozilla Firefox comes up with a resumable download manager, in which locating files downloaded is also pretty easy.
Full page zoom: You can now zoom the entire page with images, layout and of course text. In the past, it was text only that got zoomed.
Tab scrolling and tab quick menu: With the new feature known as tab quick menu, a simple menu is added to make finding the tabs easy. It’s similar to IE7. Also, the tabs now are better organized to open pages. When you open something on a tab, another tab is appended rather than the current tab is overwritten.
Text selection made easy: Double-click and drag, and you will select entire words. Triple-click and you will select entire paragraph, and use ctrl button, you can select multiple words and paragraphs.
Star bookmark: There will be a star button for the bookmarking in the location bar itself. The bookmarks may be added very quickly. Also, a second click will file and tag the bookmark.
Improved display: New text handling and display code within Gecko will smooth the text display (an improvement present in IE7) and will display the text and graphics in a better, smoother, eye-candy way.
Color management: You can now change the color profiles of images displayed in Firefox.
You don’t want to know anything about the system requirements. All systems in existence can support the software, and the memory improvement done has fixed about 300 memory errors. This will drastically boost the performance. The testing has shown an estimated double performance gain in Firefox 3 for applications like Gmail, Zoho Office, etc. Also the software’s beta version was released in 45 languages, while the original Firefox 3 may support even more. The browser, with the total market share of 17 % will soon be a grave competitor to IE, with over 75 % of the market.
Everything else, when the new browser itself gets released for us.
[Apologies to readers for no blog post tomorrow. I was at work another post on another blog of mine about the scam known as Associated Content, please read it.]
Copyright © Gayatri Jayashankar 2008
