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April 24, 2008

Firefox 3: Peeking at the new URL bar, and maybe grabbing the latest beta

Deb Richardson, a Mozilla employee, is writing about the upcoming and reportedly fast and snappy Firefox 3 on her personal blog, Dria.org. The official release is set for June, but some early adopters are downloading the latest release candidates. (This is for power users; if you don't think of yourself as one, wait for the actual release.)

I'm tempted, but I've got Firefox 2 tricked out with exactly the extensions I need, and not all of them have turned in FF 3 versions yet.

If you use Firefox, it's worth a peek at what's coming soon. If you don't use Firefox, please do. Its ability to open new sites in tabs, not windows, dozens of them, is alone worth the switch. But even better are the add-ons that let you select what would enhancements would be useful to you; you install each in a single click, and they work the next time you restart Firefox.

Deb does two posts about the new Firefox 3 URL bar, and illustrates them with lots more screenshots than I've shown below .

Here's are some snippets from Deb on Firefox 3:

Firefox 3 Bookmarks (My god, it’s full of stars…)

...Firefox 3 introduces a few new features to bookmarks that I think makes them much, much easier to use, more useful in general, and much more useful in particular for catastrophically disorganized folk like me. The three main features being introduced are: Bookmark Stars, Bookmark Tags, and Smart Bookmark Folders....

...Tags allow you to very quickly file a single bookmark in a bunch of different places, rather than having to create an exhaustive hierarchy of folders and file each bookmark carefully within that organizational structure....

Awesome bar:

...In Firefox 3, however, the staid and plain URL bar has been transformed into a much, much more powerful and useful tool. Dubbed the “AwesomeBar”, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you’re looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by “frecency” (an algorithm combining frequency + recency)

Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display....

...Not having to remember URLs or resort to global web searches to find pages I’ve visited before has made using the Web a whole lot easier and more efficient.

So, yeah. AwesomeBar? Awesome. If you’re willing to play with not-quite-fully-baked software (by which I mean “beta”), you can experience the awesome yourself by grabbing the Firefox 3 Beta 5 download and testing it out.

For the adventurous: In response to a question I asked in comments on Deb's first post, about whether it was time, Seeker wrote,

USE FF3? beta 4 was buggy, but beta 5 is nice, it is definitely time to download. the only drawback is many (about half?) of the extensions out there don’t yet support b5. A few of my most critical ones, (FEBE/CLEO, Tab Mix Plus, Better Gmail, Better Greader, and Tiny Menu) still don’t work in b5.

For my up to date list of ff3 extensions, check out http://www.twoorthree.net/2008/04/firefox-3-exten.html

If you go: I've been through many upgrades of many programs, and if I'm sniffing around a late beta I'm not far away from doing this. What tipped it for me:

Lifehacker's The Complete Field Guide to Testing Firefox 3. At the end, there's a "there be dragons here" section: "Make Your Extensions Work with the Firefox 3 Beta." Results may be unpredictable, but readers are following the "about:config" directions and reporting back with results.

Read all the comments. And try this on a rainy day -- you really don't want to do optional hacking on a sunny spring weekend. No, you don't.

You can always wait for the official release, when the install program will seamlessly roll out the whole shebang for you.

This post means to offer something to look forward to, not marching orders.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:32 PM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: seeker on April 25, 2008 6:28 PM