After upgrading to Ubuntu8 Hardy, I have been using the new beta release of Firefox, which ships automatically with the OS upgrade. It has a whole bunch of new features, some of which are very useful, and I thought I’d give my thoughts here.

The documentation says that there is a new rendering engine, which frankly I am not technical enough to understand properly, but in terms of user experience, the site also claims that Firefox now has

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.

Which has been extremely useful. due to ongoing driver/resolution/graphics issues, the web has been a pain to use at times on this PC. But with the scalable full page zoom, it almost doesn’t matter any more. It works far better than in Opera or IE as I remember it. With the new zoom feature, text no longer runs way outside of what the designer obviously intended, and images are now viewable. I can now see who that person in the thumbnail picture on facebook is. And the fact that I no longer have to increase the size immediately on entering a site/tab because it is stored for me, improves use considerably.

The next very sensible change is the

Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.

It always bothered me that when I logged in to a site where I was unsure exactly what password I had used, that Firefox would only ask me if I wanted to remember it before I knew that I’d gotten the password right. It also now drops down at the top of the page rather than as a dialog, which makes it far easier to ignore – if you don’t want to remember the password, you don’t have to click anything, and it doesn’t force itself upon your browsing experience. Which is far, far better.

Possibly the most interesting change (to me) as something that they’ve improved without my ever having noticed it was broken is

Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for. Results are returned according to their frecency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that you’re seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!

This works very well. Adaptive algorithms that tune to my habits? Generally something to be sceptical about. But this one actually does seem to work. Firstly the dropdown from the address bar is larger, each entry is about 2.5 times the size what it was, features a favicon if it can retrieve one, and lets you see far easier. Secondly, it works on parts of urls, not just scans from the beginning. You can type the name of the .html file, or a part of the directory, or partial words that are included in the address. And it actually does seem to bring up the most recent and most regular in the list for pretty much everything I’ve wanted to autocomplete. This is probably the one feature that I would really miss should I change browser. (Apart from the page zoom, which is useful to me but only because it fixes issues that firefox shouldn’t really have to.)

Only two other things that have been useful to me, but not so I’d shout about them, but they are the ability to Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit. Which I can see being useful for some people, although I’ve just disabled it, and also the Text selection improvements: multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; double-click drag selects in “word-by-word” mode; triple-clicking selects a paragraph. Although I’ve not used it much more than to check that it works, I can remember wanting to do this and being irritated in times past. Good to know that you could.

On the other hand…

It is a beta release. It crashes. Quite a lot. It has all kinds of problems with Google services that you have to log in to. More specifically, logging out of them. Leaving Gmail crashes it consistently as in pretty much 95% of occasions I log out. Google Reader on occasion (without any particular rhyme or reason as far as I can see, I have read somewhere that it’s more to do with processes running elsewhere that causes this to happen rather than an internal Firefox problem per se, but I haven’t a clue what it is that I’m running that does so.) Analytics and Webmaster Tools have been almost always fine, Facebook crashes on logout every now & then, but Gmail is the real killer.

So….

All said, I completely understand why they decided to ship it as the default browser for Hardy. The improvements are genuine improvements, and have made the browser better. Having to use Opera to access Gmail is a pain. (More so for me probably because of above issues about this PC) If they fix this in the final release, which I’m sure they will, it looks like a very good one. It’s enough of a better browser that I haven’t uninstalled it to revert back, or installed the previous version to run alongside it.

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post author: SGK
date made: april, 17th 2008
date posted: april, 17th 2008
posted in: News
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ni masih versi beta(yg ke-5??) sih, sebenernya versi ini buat test/percobaan, apa udah ok untuk dilepas ke pasaran ato blon, targetnya sih katanya untuk para developer dan komunitas “testing”nya mereka, jadi kalo ada bug bisa di-fix sebelum keluar versi finalnya. sayangnya beberapa add-ons dari versi terdahulu ga kompatible ama versi ini, contohnya TOR (The Onion Router), jadi saya pake 2 firefox!? ribet yak?!

ada apaan aja sih di firefox 3 beta 5?

menurut websitenya, firefox 3 itu berbasis gecko 1.9 web rendering platform, lebih gampang digunain, performa yang lebih meyakinkan, platform baru untuk para developer, dan yang pasti:lebih aman!

berikut beberapa perubahan yang menyangkut aspek keamanan di firefox 3 beta 5:

• One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you’re connected to. (Try it here!)
• Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. (Try it here!)
• New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. (Try it here!)
• New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate. (Try it here!)
• Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.
• Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.
• Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.
• Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.
• Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service better restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain.
• Better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks.

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info tentang firefox:

donlot firefox 3 beta 5

release notes (performance)

firefox addons

info tentang gecko:

gecko on wikipedia

gecko feature list

S-Anand says that firefox3b5 is unstable compared to earlier version. Read it here.

Mostly I find Firefox 3, beta 5 a great pleasure to use. Fast and very intuitive user friendly way of working. Established Firefox applications are gradually becoming functional. Today I found Tab Scope works of FF 3 beta 5. This app allows the user to see a small preview of a page by holding mouse cursor over tab.

But

I cannot download exe files. Yesterday I could not do it on FF, switched to Safari then had to resort to Internet Explorer. Wish I thought of trying Opera first, but I was a bit tired of messing around. FF3 beta 5 is a beta, users are warned that it is only for testing, so I should not complain, and it’s possible that the problem is restricted to my computer, or XP home edition (SP 2). I’ll be switching to Mac X Leopard next month, but XP it is for now, which is the most widespread OS in the world at present.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is a developer preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purpose only (still, I am using it). Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.
You can find the release notes over here.

Here is the official Firefox 3 Beta 5 site. Go check it out now!

You can download Firefox 3 Beta 5, here. The download size is pretty small. It is available in 45 languages.

Enjoy secure and faster browsing! Happy Browsing!

Senaste betan beräknas låsas nu till veckan.
Mycket nytt gott, bland annat ökas lokalisering (eg. localization, anpassa GUI till respektive plattform) och höjd prestanda.
Personligen hoppas jag på inbyggt stöd för flerradiga tabbar och bokmärkesfält.
Tills dess kan man med fördel ta en titt på Tab Kit

The new Windows theme for Firefox 3 is growing on me as it takes shape through the different beta versions. But what’s with the yellow roof on the home icon?

It’s really bothering me for some reason, so I think I’ll remove it and just use “Home” on the History menu. At least on Windows Vista (what I have at home) the Home icon is the same color as the back/forward buttons and the refresh arrow.

Segundo a Fundação Mozilla, além da correção de bugs (especialmente o problemão de consumo de memória), a maior novidade é o aumento de conexões paralelas por host. Agora, o máximo é de 6 (como o IE8) e o número de conexões HTTP passou para 30 (eram 24). Não chega a ser um FasterFox, mas promete melhorar a velocidade de carregamento dos sites, ao custo de uma carga maior nos servidores.

Na corrida pela maior pontuação no Acid 3, essa versão chegou a 71 pontos.

Fonte: MeioBit

Mozilla advanced another important step in its journey to the final release of Firefox 3.  This is going to be the most important upgrade to the most innovative web browser since Mosaic Netscape in 1994.

Today Mozilla proudly announced Firefox 3 Beta 5 (Gran Paradiso) is ready for download.  This upgrade is a public preview release intended for developers and user’s feedback.  It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed.

New features and changes in this milestone that require community feedback include:

In order to avoid a couple of unnecessary headaches, I’ll wait until the polished product hits the streets sometime in June.   However, if you can’t wait until June, you can go ahead and download Firefox 3 Beta 5 by clicking here.

There are numerous online reviews of this milestone on the Internet, but so far Mozilla Links has the most comprehensive review I’ve read.  I urge you to check it out if you have the curious itch for new things.