Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The WebReview: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web

Firefox 3 in two words: It's fast.

Before releasing Firefox 3 on Tuesday, Firefox's developers fixed memory leaks and bugs that slowed down Firefox 2. And the developers added lots of little timesaving features to streamline usage. The designers paid particular attention to tools that make it easier to identify favorite Web sites, and return to them over and over.

But the news isn't all good. Firefox 3's developers, Mozilla.org, brag about new security features designed to protect users against phishing and sites that attempt to download malware. But the new features are unreliable, and will likely lull naive users into a false sense of security. The potential damage is limited there -- even moderately expert users shouldn't have a problem because they don't need the warnings. But from a security standpoint, Firefox 3 is a step backward.

The biggest changes in Firefox 3 are under the hood. Mozilla developers plugged memory holes that were causing earlier versions of Firefox to use more and more memory over time, until the browser slowed down the entire system and crashed it entirely.

Those problems have pretty much been eliminated with Firefox 3. I've been using Firefox 3 pre-release versions (reviewed here) as my primary browser since December, and it's crashed a couple of times total during recent months. That's compared with crashes a couple of times a week with Firefox 2.

The most useful new feature in Firefox 3: You can now zoom an entire Web page. Previous versions of Firefox only let you zoom the text, which eventually meant the text was going to start overlapping with other element on the page. With Firefox 3, the entire page zooms in and out, with the graphics, interactive elements, text, and layout all remaining in proportion to one another.

Firefox 3 also remembers the zoom setting for any site you visit, and returns to that setting when you return to any page on the site.

Changes to the location bar are much more significant. It has a nickname now: The Awesome Bar (and that's an awesome nickname). It looks the same, but the behavior is different. When you start typing into the Awesome Bar, Firefox starts searching through your browsing history and bookmarks. The Awesome bar shows you a dropdown menu of pages, and when you see the page you want, you can just arrow or mouse down and select it.

Previous versions of Firefox had a rudimentary version of that kind of search, but the search was limited to the URL and title of a page, and the letters you typed had to be at the beginning of the page URL.

The Awesome Bar weights its search results by an algorithm Mozilla.org calles "frecency" (another awesome word). The searches are weighted to favor frequently-visited pages and pages you visited more recently.

For more details, Dria.org has a good overview of the Awesome Bar and how it works.

I love the Awesome Bar, but some users of Firefox test versions hated it. If you hate it, you can disable it by installing the oldbar add-on to Firefox.

A Library Of Bookmarks And Browsing History

Mozilla gave a complete overhaul to the way Firefox handles bookmarks and history. In Firefox 3, bookmarks and history are bookmarked into a single database, called the Library.

The Library allows you to add tags to bookmarks, and search bookmarks by tags. Tags are just words that describe a site -- for example you might tag information.com with the words "tech" and "news." The Library also supports the traditional folder method of sorting bookmarks.

I prefer tags to folders. You can give a single bookmark multiple tags, whereas you can only put a bookmark in a single folder. I love it that Firefox now supports tags. But many people prefer folders, and Firefox supports those too.

Firefox 3 makes it easy to bookmark pages quickly. The Awesome Bar has a star on the right side of it -- click the star and the page you're looking at is automatically saved to a folder for unfiled bookmarks. It's one-click bookmarking. Click the star again to edit the bookmark.

The Library also lets you create "smart bookmark folders," similar to "smart playlists" in iTunes. You can save searches, and the results look like standard bookmark folders. Any future pages you bookmark that fit the search criteria will automatically be added to the smart bookmark folder. Firefox 3 gives you three smart bookmarks to get you started: Most visited, recently bookmarked, and recent tags; you can make your own, too.

The blog CyberNetNews has instructions on how to create a Smart Bookmark by using Firefox 3's built-in search parameters. It's a little tricky, beyond the reach of average users, but programmers should find it easy.

The Library is a huge step forward for Firefox -- but it's still got a long way to go. The interface to the bookmarks manager is cluttered and confusing. For example, the first time you save a search, it's difficult to figure out where the saved search will turn up (answer: it shows up as a smart folder, on the bottom of the folder pane).

Searching bookmarks and history is confusing as well. If you search on "dog cat" you'll find all your bookmarks and history with both words. However, can you search for "dog OR cat"? Can you create complex queries, nested in parentheses? I haven't been able to figure out how to get those things to work, which suggests shortcomings in either the search function itself, or in its documentation.

The bookmarks and history Library is built on the standard SQLite database, making it easy for developers to extend. I expect we're going to see many, many extensions to streamline and add power to the native Firefox 3 Library. Security Comes Up Short

Firefox 3 includes new security features designed to warn users when they visit phishing sites and sites that try to download malware to their computers. Sounds great in theory -- but the feature failed more than half the time in testing.

This is not a big deal for users with even a moderate degree of sophistication. They know better than to click on questionable links.

But naive users -- the ones most at risk from phishing and malware -- might think that the Firefox security precautions work, and if Firefox lets them through to a site, the site must be honest.

So the fact that the warning feature is unreliable makes the Internet more dangerous than if the warnings didn't exist at all.

On the positive side of security advancements: The software streamlines the behavior of its "remember password" box. Firefox 3 replaces the pop-up window in previous versions with a horizontal strip at the top of the browser window. The strip stays up until you click a button to dispose of it; which lets you confirm that you typed the right password before you click "remember."

Among the other new features in Firefox 3:

As with any new version of Firefox, the software still doesn't support many extensions written for old versions. On the other hand, my old favorite 1Password, for password management on the Mac, is supported. Another favorite, TabMix Plus for tab management, isn't officially supported on Firefox 3 as of Tuesday evening; however, you can download a developer's build that's compatible.

Also compatible with Firefox 3: Foxmarks, a wonderful extension and service designed to synchronize Firefox bookmarks between multiple copies of the browser running on different machines.

Firefox 3 is a great browser and huge improvement over previous versions. Should you use it? Well, a browser is a personal choice. Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, and Firefox are all good browsers, and all have their adherents. However, you should definitely upgrade to Firefox 3 if you're using the earlier version, and if you've been thinking about giving Firefox a try, now's a good time to do it.