A forum post on another website I run reminded me that not everyone has been enjoying the awesomeness of the Firefox 3 Beta, so if you fancy yourself a tech savvy internet user, go download it!
New download manager: It now sports a more streamlined look and incorporates a search function.
OS Specific Themes: Firefox now looks like it’s native to your operating system. Never been a huge issue for me since Firefox is theme-able, but it’s a nice touch.
New Address Bar: It now searches your browser history as well as your bookmarks as you type a web address. My main complaint is that when searching your bookmarks it only displays the full URL, and not the root domain as well as the full bookmarked URL (does that make sense? Like if you have hulu.com/recent/episodes bookmarked and you type hu into your address bar, you might expect to see hulu.com listed as well as hulu.com/recent/episodes… but it’s not).
They’ve also added an outline of a star to the address bar, clicking it results in adding the page as a bookmark, the star will now display as solid blue. Clicking it again brings up a prompt with the option of editing bookmark details or removing it.
Non-intrusive prompts: I really like the way Firefox handles offering to remember a password for you, it displays as a bar along the top of the page and no longer steals focus.
Improved memory usage: Firefox not only starts faster, it uses up less resources. Yay!
If you’re at least marginally good with computers, I would recommend at least giving the beta a try. The rendering engine can be a little weird at times, and there are very few compatible add-ons right now, but it’s coming along nicely.
