Firefox 3 is out and Redefines the Web Experience

Zyuu — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:42:49 GMT

Today Firefox 3 was released. You can download it over at the official Firefox website. It's a great browser, the best I've ever used, I base this on experience from using the release candidates for a long time now.

It's absolutely much faster, uses less memory, it's by far the safest browser out there right now and it has great support for additional features via addons.

Firefox 3 is the culmination of three years of efforts from thousands of developers, security experts, localization and support communities, and testers from around the globe.

What are you waiting for? Download Firefox 3 now.

What’s New in Firefox 3:

The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features to deliver a faster, more secure and customizable Web browsing experience for all.

User Experience. The enhancements to Firefox 3 provide the best possible browsing experience on the Web. The new Firefox 3 smart location bar, affectionately known as the “Awesome Bar,” learns as people use it, adapting to user preferences and offering better fitting matches over time. The Firefox 3 Library archives browsing history, bookmarks, and tags, where they can be easily searched and organized. One-click bookmarking and tagging make it easy to remember, search and organize Web sites. The new full-page zoom displays any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.

Performance. Firefox 3 is built on top of the powerful new Gecko 1.9 platform, resulting in a safer, easier to use and more personal product. Firefox 3 now uses less memory while it’s running, and its redesigned page rendering and layout engine means users see Web pages two to three times faster than Firefox 2.

Security. Firefox 3 raises the bar for security. The new malware and phishing protection helps protect from viruses, worms, trojans and spyware to keep people safe on the Web. Firefox 3’s one-click site ID information allows users to verify that a site is what it claims to be. Mozilla’s open source process leverages the experience of thousands of security experts around the globe.

Customization. Everyone uses the Web differently, and Firefox 3 lets users customize their browser with more than 5,000 add-ons. Firefox Add-ons allow users to manage tasks like participating in online auctions, uploading digital photos, seeing the weather forecasts, and listening to music, all from the convenience of the browser. The new Add-ons Manager helps users to find and install add-ons directly from the browser.

For more information about Mozilla Firefox 3 and how it delivers an easier, faster, and safer online experience, visit http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/features/.

Mozilla Firefox 3 is available now for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems as a free download from http://www.getfirefox.com/.

The release of Firefox 3 kicks off Download Day, the Mozilla community’s grassroots campaign to set a brand new Guinness World Record for the greatest number of software downloads in 24 hours. The worldwide community effort begins the minute Firefox 3 is released and will continue for a full day. For more information, please visit http://www.spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord/....

Do you think Firefox 3 is as good as most people do? Which browser do you prefer to use when checking out the world wide web? I've noticed the majority of websites I visit, run much better with Firefox then for example Internet Explorer.

Firefox 3 Launches June 17th

Kody — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:24:19 GMT

While we normally shy away from something not directly related to gaming, I wanted to take a moment to remind everyone that Firefox 3's official launch date has been announced.

This is important because it can affect your browsing experience on Curse.com. The new version of Firefox includes many performance tweaks, memory leak fixes, and speedier browsing in general. I've personally been using the latest Release Candidate since it was made available, and the improvements are immediately noticeable -- especially if you typically browse with a large number of tabs open.

Mozilla has also put together a special Spread Firefox campaign, as they attempt to break the world record for number of software downloads in a single day. If you'd like to get in on supporting Firefox 3, and want to see a record shattered, then head over and pledge to download Firefox 3 on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008.

Firefox 3.0 Release Notes

More Secure

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.

Easier to Use

Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
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.
Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
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.
Podcasts and Videocasts can be associated with your media playback tools.
Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.
Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.
Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.
Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple resizer item.
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.
Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
Plugin management: users can disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.
Integration with Windows: Firefox now has improved Windows icons, and uses native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.
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 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.
Integration with Linux: Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.

More Personal

Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.
Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
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!
Smart Bookmarks Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as your more frequently visited pages with the new smart bookmarks folder on your bookmark toolbar.
Places Organizer: view, organize and search through all of your bookmarks, tags, and browsing history with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches. Create and restore full backups whenever you want.
Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).
Download & Install Add-ons: the Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown.
Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.

Improved Platform for Developers

New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles.
Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).
A more complete overview of Firefox 3 for developers is available for website and add-on developers.

Improved Performance

Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.

Other : firefox

Firefox 3 is out and Redefines the Web Experience

Firefox 3 Launches June 17th

Firefox 3.0 Release Notes