Friday, June 20, 2008

Firefox 3 Browser Review : Awesome!

I just started using the new Mozilla Firefox 3 Internet / Web Browser yesterday, and I have already reached the conclusion that this version is simply fantastic, and oh my God is it FAST!

Speed, Speed, Speed...
The page rendering for most of the sites I commonly browse - both on the Internet and on my local Intranet / LAN network - is easily twice as fast if not faster. I have experienced page-loads and rendering so quick that I literally blinked and missed witnessing the page refresh; it was that quick, and this was on pages that were definitely no where near this quick to load in Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer (IE) 6 or 7!

Content Scaling...
When it comes to increasing and decreasing the size of text/graphics/layout-items, Firefox 3 is so far the best I have ever seen at "getting it right". By this, I mean that it keeps relative positions of text and layout items intact while scaling their size, and thusfar in my testing, it is the only browser to be consistently accurate. Even Firefox 2 had issues getting this right, and IE 6 had all sorts of problems, and IE7 had a few problems too (on the same pages). I give top marks to the CSS handling and overall page-rendering, at any scale, to Firefox 3.

"Live Drag-n-Drop"...
"Live Drag-n-Drop" - well, that is what I call it,... where you can see an outline of the text you are dragging around in the browser, like when I am editing this blog entry and highlighting a region of text (like a sentence) and dragging it to a different area in this edit window. Quite Nice indeed!

The URL-Bar Improvements...
I just love the new smart auto-completion feature that can locate relevant URL choices from my bookmarks, prior page-viewing history, and so on. As I start typing a word, the dropdown presents options not just with that word at the beginning of the URL, but anywhere within the URL (or, it seems, even with the word in the site-description / tags). Wonderful!

I like the concept of this drop-down control so much I can already imagine places I want to use it in my own software. I don't know how easy that control is to adapt, but I will have to dig into it a bit and find out.

Get Firefox 3 now, and don't look back...
OK, I'm not going to write abiout every last feature. Fact is, the new browser is wonderful. Just go to the Mozilla FireFox 3 Download Site and get it for yourself. Install it, try it out, and you'll soon see it will live up to my review and then some.

Enjoy! (hopefully as much as I am enjoying it!)

No comments: