I certainly can’t go back to use Internet Explorer after plenty of years with Firefox. For the past few months, Mozilla Corporation has been releasing periodic open betas for Firefox 3.
Now on Beta 4, a whole new set of features have been implemented. Overall, Firefox 3 will be using the Gecko 1.9 Web platform, which provides Firefox more stability and security.
Here’s the official word, "Firefox 3 Beta 4 includes more than 900 enhancements from the previous beta, including drastic improvements to performance and memory usage, as well as fixes for stability, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta."
Here are some of the new improvements in Beta 4:
1. New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as your files download.
2. Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.
3. Integration with Vista: Firefox now has Vista-specific icons, and uses native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.
4. Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and spell-checker in web forms and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.
5. Integration with Linux: Firefox’s default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.
6. Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in significant improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 4, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
As of January 2008, Firefox had about 15% of all recorded Web browser use, which makes it the second most popular browser in use worldwide. Here’s to satisfied customers for years to come!
