Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Review
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Editors Rating:
Supported OS: Windows, Mac, Linux |
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+ It’s clean and fast and allows for more great plugins! Also if you are a web developer, its feature to show all errors and warnings of a website is a very handy utility (click Tools > Error Console). Firefox 3 is the safest browser out there. The new and improved Page Zoom; not only does it increase the size of text, it also zooms pictures. This makes for a much better “Zoomed” experience. Search function in downloads now enables you to find everything that has been downloaded.
- Again from version 1 to 3 is that eats too much memory (sometimes over 100MB). AVG Free 8.0 Linkscanner is not being compatible with Firefox 3.0. it maintains the same font rendering as Firefox 2. Few of your old Plugins may not work. But considering how important Plugins are to the Firefox experience, this is going to be remedied soon enough. Firefox 3 is not compatible with older OSes such as Windows 98 and ME, and Mac OSX 10.2. |
By: Staff
Date: July 06, 2008 |
We waited so much for this new version of Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and finally our wish come true. Most of Windows users had a lot of complaints about Firefox memory consumption, and by the words of Firefox developers this new Firefox 3.0 version should dramatically decries consumption of your RAM memory.
But in my case I didn’t notice any changes when it comes memory consumption, when I did compared Firefox 2.0 vs. Firefox 3.0 with both of them having two tabs opened the consumption of memory for version 2.0 was 107.114 MB and for version 3.0 was 94.560. So as you can see there are no big changes, version 3.0 having lover consumption for about 20 MB.
Thus, with 20 tabs open, it does not reach more than 130 MB of memory usage with Firefox 3 against 136 MB for Firefox 2.0.0.14! But anyway there are still some old tricks which will help you to optimize the consumption of memory.
There is one more bad news and it’s for those who are using older operating systems; this new version 3 of Firefox web browser is not longer computable with Windows 95/98, ME and Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). It is solely dedicated for Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard.
When I tested Firefox for Acid3 test which aims rendering fluid animation (DOM2, CSS, SVG, XML, URIs) is not entirely successful, meeting with a score of 75/100.
I also used SunSpider, which allows test performance in terms of speed JavaScript in a browser, launching a series of tests on mathematical functions (cordic, partial-sums, spectral-norm), 3D (cube, morph, raytrace), encryption (AES, MD5 , SHA1, ), etc…
In this test the worst’s browser was Internet Explorer (23222.2ms + / - 21.4%), then Opera (7289.4ms + / - 1.2%), then Safari (3013.2ms + / -- 1.5%) whose results were very close to Firefox 3 (with 2518.4ms + / - 0.4%)!
For example, Firefox 3 is almost 10 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 (but the gap should be reduced with the arrival of Internet Explorer 8). If you do not believe our results there is nothing prevents you from achieving your own tests, go to page benchmark SunSpider.
The icon of the site and the designation of the page are better presented than before. When you type a URL in the address bar, it appealed, without realizing it, the history of the browser. Instead of entering the site address (www.yoursite.com), you can directly enter a keyword which remembers and belonging to this site. For example, if I visited several sites related to software, I tape directly "software" within address bar. As a result, research is more sophisticated and all sites related to the keyword are displayed in the address bar; very useful and above all very practical feature.
According to the Firefox developers, Gmail interface which is based on Ajax are faster loading. One example is the Gmail messenger, Google Docs, etc… By entering a search term in the Google.com search engine and even before clicking the "Google Search" button, the results most likely are already exempt.
The only thing we are sure is that history has changed. It remains to determine whether it is better or not. In Firefox 2 was on a time scale divided into three parts, "Today", "Yesterday" and "More than 6 days." The names of sites followed one another and are ranked by date of visit, number of visits… Now, everything is automatically classified in chronological order, the last site visited (minute in progress) until the date you want. Just use the elevator or research in history to find what interests us.
The Bookmark tool is placed inside the same window as the history, and it passes with one click from one to another. You will understand, we can drag an address to address visited favorite! When a page you seduced, we can continue to go through the Bookmarks menu, Bookmark this page (or Ctrl + D), but it would be wrong to pursue this path. The new function to add bookmarks is quicker and more efficient.
Of all the pages visited is a white star. The site attracts you, click the star that will become yellow and do occupy most of the rest for now! All sites "marked" appear in a temporary folder (Bookmarks menu and Recently Bookmarked). The mark-page now displays an additional file, "the most visited." It is a sign that shows statistics of the numbers of visits, dates of visits, etc…
You can also import and export bookmarks to HTML format as was the case before and format JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) lighter, and format text. I suggest you that before you install Firefox 3.0 you make a backup of your Bookmarks within Firefox 2.0 because they want be saved; after you created a backup then you can proceed with Firefox 3 installation. After installation if finished check your bookmarks, if they are removed you can simply return them but importing your bookmarks from version 2.0.
One greater feature which is already available within Opera web browser is if you have more than 1 tab open and you close Firefox the application asks you if you want to memorize pages for the reopening at the next session.
The window "Downloads" still exists, with the presence of three separate buttons for pause, resume or cancellation. The search function in downloads now enables you to find everything that has been repatriated. A right click on the highlighted item says more about the destination of the file and two shortcuts allow you to make "Go to Download page" and "Copy Download Link",
Mozilla Firefox Add-ons
Typically, most add-ons for version 2 work just fine with Firefox 3 if they have been adapted. The page add-ons which have been completely revamped, more recently, always brings together all extensions.
As usual extensions are automatically checked and updated if and only if, in the Tools menu, Options, Advanced tab and Update you checked the option "Automatically check for updates to:".
In previous version of Firefox I had installed Google Toolbar and after I install and run Firefox 3.0 for the first time Google Toolbar was automatically installed. It was the same thing with Alexa toolbar and I suppose that most of other add-ons will have their updates too.
The web browser Firefox 3.0 of the Mozilla Foundation offers a lot of underlying changes and therefore not necessarily visible.
The new Gecko 1.9 engine is more compatibility for displaying pages and in principle improved performance. However, during our tests, this optimization performance has not really translated in terms of speed of loading pages as it is announced but anyway you definitely should download this new version of Firefox.
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