First thoughts on Firefox 3

I’ve been using Firefox 3 for over a week now and so far it’s been good. It has some improvements over version 2. Here are some of the new features.

• Smart location bar: This feature is great. If you visited a website before but can’t remember the exact URL, you can type a portion or something about it and Firefox will try to list the URL it thinks you want to visit.
• The new password manager is less annoying. When you visit a site where you enter a password, it no longer creates a pop up asking you what you want to do – remember the password, not now, or never for this site. Instead a little bar up the top asks the question, so you can continue to browse the page uninterrupted.
• On OS X, Firefox 3’s look and feel is similar to Safari but has a ton more features.
• New and better security.
• Saving bookmarks is easier.
• The add-ons manager is better.

Those are some of the things I like. It is not a perfect browser. It still crashes from time to time on OS X. I’m sure it crashes on Windows as well. But what I miss the most from FIrefox 2 is browser sync. This is no longer compatible with version 3. I did, however, installed the toolbar. It has it’s own bookmark management system. So far it’s been good. I just have to play with it more and get used to it.

I still have Firefox 2 running at work. I haven’t upgraded it yet because I have to continue to run web applications on it. I feel many of our users haven’t upgraded yet so just in case, our applications must continue to support it. I doubt there will be any problems though but who knows. All my other computers have already upgraded, I suggest you try it out.