The Mozilla corporation/community have released Firefox 3.0 today, with many improvements (both UI wise and backend changes).
Similar to Firefox 2.0 & 1.5, this release has had some serious amount of QA pounding on it, I would say it is their most planned & executed release management to date.
The things that interest me for this release include:
- Awesome bar (smart location bar)
- one-click bookmarking
- Tagging history/bookmarks
- Better password manager (not getting in your face)
- New EV certificates (better identification of secure sites)
- Add-ons Manager with inbuilt Addons listing
- Download Manager improvements (mainly resumable across sessions, more robust backend)
- Full Zoom (images & text zoom together)
- Improved Memory Management (cycle collector, reduced leaks, jemalloc allocator to use less memory)
- Faster JavaScript
- Faster Page Load
- Advanced Graphics (reflow rewrite, better SVG/Canvas support, better graphics backend (Cairo))
- Future Weave sync'ing
I only started using 3.0 with the release candidates (RC1), because of the "addons not yet updated" problem. But I found updates for my day-today addons during RC1, so upgraded.
Finally Firefox 3.0 has places support, which I think will make a real difference to users web browsing experience (mainly through the "Awesome bar"). Here's my anticipation from earlier:
When Firefox 1.5 came out, I was already excited about 2.0, what with Places & the SQLite backends, but that didn't really pan out, should be in Firefox 3.0 though...
Firefox 1.5 released today
... Already waiting for Firefox 2.0 (from the 1.8.1 Gecko branch) with its "Places" support (redoing bookmarks, history, feeds etc. into a new user interface and storing in a super fast SQLite DB).
Firefox 3.0 will come off the 1.9 branch, with it's massive Gecko improvements (rewrite rendering using Cairo on all platforms, reflow rewritten, complete SVG support??) and the aforementioned Places with tagging system for bookmarks/history etc.
Hopefully download before 3am, 19th June AEST to create a new Guinness world record for the most downloads of a software program in a day!!
