Initial Reflections on Firefox 3.0

[ June 21st, 2008 @ 12:12 am ] ... [ C. S. Magor ]

Initial Reflections on Firefox 3.0

Like over 8 million other people I downloaded Firefox 3.0 in the hours after its official release. I did have a play with some of the earlier Beta versions, but left the release candidates alone as I simply didn’t have time. I must say, it was worth the wait and despite the apparent security hole, it has made for some pretty good browsing.

The minor cosmetic changes will be the first things for people to notice. It has a slick looking skin and the back button is slightly oversized. I use my keyboard or mouse to navigate, so don’t really make use of the back button anyway, but it is a nice touch. Back is hit a lot more times than forward, so it is good to have that improved visibility.

Another big change that has met a mixed response is the so-called “Awesome Bar.” The location bar takes a little getting used to and I must admit that I found it frustrating at first. It predicts URLs differently to the way that it did before and that affects me, as I type faster than I can hunt through a page of bookmarks.

Previously, the URL prediction was based upon characters in the URL, now it is based upon characters within the URL or title and not necessarily upon the order that they are in. As you start typing, twelve sites will be pulled up. If you add in a couple more characters it narrows the field a bit. Sites that you visit more frequently from a given predicted input will appear higher on the list. You can bookmark easily by clicking the star in the bar.

The good thing about this method is that it makes it easy to find sites with URLs that are different to their titles. If you are looking for the International Herald Tribune and you forgot that the url was http://iht.com, you could find it by typing in “International.” It is a nice touch, but it does take getting used to particularly if you have an established system of location bar navigation. It is one of those things that will probably grow on people that bother to take the time to learn it.

The RAM footprint is interesting. This was said to be something that was going to be improved, but I did not notice a whole lot of difference. With the add-ons that I have installed, Firefox 3.0 sucks about 150 MB of RAM, about the same as the last incarnation of Firefox 2 that I was running. There probably isn’t any way to get below that footprint, but the good thing is that it does not raise the bar in terms of what is required of people’s equipment.

The minimum requirements for Windows users are extremely tame, you can run Firefox 3 providing that you have Windows 2000 or up and the hardware requirements are as follows:

Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
52 MB hard drive space

That makes room for a whole lot of legacy equpment, which will certainly be appreciated by those that can’t afford to or don’t want to upgrade their equipment.

The downside is for Mac users, Firefox 3 is for Leopard 10.4 and above only and the system requirements are a little steeper. You will need the following:

Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
128 MB RAM (Recommended: 256 MB RAM or greater)
200 MB hard drive space

The options menu is set up a little differently. The layout looks better, but the Proxy configuration settings are hidden away a bit. I also noticed a Sort By Name function in the Bookmarks folder which I don’t believe I had used before. Other than that, it has much the same feel as Firefox 2. It might load a little faster, but I am not sure as it would not be noticeable on my machine. I am happy with the upgrade but am still waiting for some of my more frequently used add-ons to catch up.

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