I’m sure that most people who have been reading my blog or listening to my various podcasts for awhile are aware of my ever-changing attitude towards web browsers. Ever since Safari was first released by Apple back in 2003, I have never used a particular web browser continuously for more than a year at a time. I ditched Internet Explorer back when Safari came out in 2003, and since then have utilized Safari, Mozilla (later replaced to be Seamonkey), Firefox, Camino, and OmniWeb (and I’ve promised myself that I’ll give Flock a try one of these days) over various times, even switching back and forth between them a few times. Two years ago (summer 2006), I went with Firefox 2 beta for a few months, liking it more and more as it went mature, but then shortly after it went mature (and Camino later went 1.0), I switched over to Camino for a good while. Then, last October, when Leopard came out, I gave Safari another go, and found myself loving how it had been improved in Leopard.

Well, about a month and a half ago, Firefox 3 went final. Regardless of your choice of web browser, you have probably heard about Firefox 3’s release and how it successfully set (perhaps even inaugurated) a Guinness World Record for most copies of a software application downloaded in a 24-hour time period, with over 8 million downloads. And, just to show that I was part of the fun, I downloaded Firefox 3 that day too, and I even have a certificate to prove it. However, once I opened up Firefox, I found, lo and behold, that the browser feels so much nicer, smoother, faster, and more Mac-like than Firefox 2 did, and since then, I’ve been using Firefox now for the past six weeks, evaluating it and getting a feel for it, and so now it’s time for me to review it.

One of the things that Firefox 2 did when its interface came out was it unveiled a new unified interface that was identical between Mac and Windows, but they quickly heard word that that wasn’t what people wanted; they wanted a browser interface that felt like it glued into the interface of their operating system, and Firefox 3 delivers new interfaces optimized for whatever OS you happen to be using. Of course, I can only speak as a Mac user for this review, but I’ve got to say that Firefox 3 comes with a gorgeous and, dare I say it, innovative new user interface that fits right in with the new Leopard interface and feels much more at home than Firefox 2 did. Heck, it actually feels more like an OS X interface than Camino did, because the Bookmarks Bar and Tab Bar take on the grey/metal look. The toolbar buttons take on a Mac-like look, but remain distinct from Safari as they utilize round, oval-shaped buttons instead of the rounded-corner-square buttons that Safari uses. (There is a really nice Safari-like theme available if you really want.)
In addition, there’s some really nice attention to detail going on here. In an interesting interface twist, Firefox 3 makes the Back button a lot larger than the Forward button, since the Back button is the button you use much more often. But at the same time, the drop-down menus that are normally associated with these buttons have been combined into one menu, with the page you’re currently looking at in bold. Pages that you’d go forward to see lie above the current page listing; pages that you’d go back to see lie below. And just to give you one more visual cue, when you highlight a particular page in that menu, a left or right arrow is displayed to tell you whether you’re going back or forward. (Oh, and I can’t thank Firefox enough for having SEPARATE reload and stop buttons–one of my biggest Safari gripes.)

The URL Bar in Firefox 3 has also been given a functionality facelift. It’s now known as the Smart Location Bar (also nicknamed the “Awesome Bar,” though I doubt that I’d go that far personally). While it still lets you type in URLs as normal, it also lets you type in words or phrases and will search through your history and your bookmarks to find the relevant links that you’re looking for, which has indeed been handy for me a few times as it’s allowed me to quickly find a recently-visited webpage which I didn’t remember the URL of. Mozilla claims that the bar gets smarter as you use it, though I haven’t seen very many adjustments made based on my experiences with it so far. Regardless of whether or not you’re entering a real URL, the menu of suggestions that appears now includes the page title and favicon from that page, in addition to the URL, which makes the menu so much more useful in my opinion. There is a slight downside, though, in that the drop-down inherits the page titles from the first time a page is visited, and apparently never changes them. For example, the first time I went to Twitter in Firefox 3 was one of the thousands of times when Twitter was down. Now, whenever I enter “twitter.com,” the suggestions menu always lists the page title as if Twitter was down. :/

Firefox’s search has also seen its share of improvements. While it’s still not quite up to par with Inquisitor (and a “Recent Searches” list would be nice as well), it still supports multiple search engines and even highlights a shade of blue when you visit a site that it has a search engine for, so that you can quickly add it. However, a more significant (and more hidden) feature is the ability to add “keywords” to search engines. OmniWeb and the Sogudi plugin for Safari also have this feature, calling them “shortcuts.” Essentially, by going into the Manage Search Engines pane and defining a keyword for a particular search engine, you can then use that keyword in the Smart Location Bar to execute a search. (For example, if I make Google’s keyword “g” (without quotes), and type “g Flowers” in the URL bar, Firefox will return a Google search for flowers, and I haven’t had to tab over to the search box at all!)

Firefox 3 has also greatly simplified the process of bookmarking pages to the point where it’s now as easy, if not a bit easier, than Safari. (The interface for managing bookmarks, however, is still a bit clunkier than Safari’s iTunes-like bookmark management.) On the right side of the Smart Location Bar, a new outline of a star icon appears. To bookmark a page, all you have to do is click on the star, and the page is immediately bookmarked and added to the Unsorted Bookmarks category, and the star outline is shaded in. Click on the star again, and a translucent box pops up, allowing you to rename the bookmark and add it to the Bookmarks Bar, Bookmarks Menu, or any bookmarks folder that you’ve set up. You can also tag your bookmarks, and those tags can be used to bring up bookmarks in the Smart Location Bar. It’s actually a pretty nice front-end, now if they could only simplify the Organize Bookmarks dialog to be a little bit more like Safari’s, and we’d be in business. Smart Folders are also an option now, including one default one that shows sites that you visit most frequently in the Bookmarks Bar.

The last nice interface touch that Firefox has inherited is some nice improvements in how it handles feeds. Clicking on the feed icon when it appears in the Smart Location Bar now allows you to see a preview of the feed in the browser before you choose to subscribe to it in your favorite local or online feed reader (or a Live Bookmark). This is really nice so you can make sure that you’re not subscribing to the wrong feed, or if you just want to look at the feed without subscribing. (You can choose to bypass this by default if you wish.)

Many websites establish a secure (SSL) connection to your browser that is often recognizable by a lock icon somewhere on the browser window and the existence of an “https” proxy at the beginning of a URL. However, Firefox 3 takes its security measures up to the next level, offering layers of security that I’ve never seen before in any other free web browser. The favicon in the URL is now itself the indicator of a website’s security. A website with an unsecure connection displays with a normal background, however, a website with a secure HTTPS connection will display with a blue background behind the favicon (i.e. Gmail with HTTPS on). Other websites with a fully-complete VeriSign HTTPS security certificate will give you a green background behind the favicon and the name of whoever is operating the website so you can be sure that it is secure. Clicking on the favicon at any time will pop-up additional information about the website’s security, and clicking on the More Information button in the pop-up shows you a dialog box that lets you see info such as how many times you’ve visited that website, whether or not it’s storing cookies, and even set individual site preferences and see other info on how Firefox is rendering the page you are viewing. For those that care about it, this kind of information is a real goldmine and really makes Firefox, in my opinion, the most security-conscious browser available.

There continue to be really nice things that I love about Firefox that Safari can’t beat. One of my biggest bits of praise for Firefox is that it allows you to specify that every single link that would open in a new window is instead forced to open in a new tab, thus ensuring that you only have one window (unless you manually open a second window), something that I love. Firefox also makes much more-frequent use of favicons (a internet feature that I will swear by), including their appearance in tabs. The Tab Bar also has a very useful drop-down menu on the right side that allows you to see all of the tabs you have open and jump between them, which is useful when you have many tabs open, and there are many other relatively minor, but still-important-to-me reasons why I love Firefox.

Firefox does have a few downsides. One of the most significant, in my opinion, is the fact that the History menu is really limited, and only covers the last eight pages, without submenus for previous days (like Safari has). Firefox also doesn’t have a built-in PDF viewer to go up against Safari’s awesome built-in viewer, and while it does have a nicely improved Find bar, it’s not as nice as Safari’s (where it fades down the page to make the matching results blatantly obvious). The Downloads window is greatly improved to Firefox 3 and is much closer to catching up with Safari, but it still doesn’t quite feel like as smooth of an experience as Safari offers. I already mentioned the bit about the Bookmarks, and Safari’s Private Browsing feature would sure be nice to see. However, one of the plus sides is that Firefox is extensible, and there are numerous extensions available for Firefox that can fix some of these downsides and make Firefox do many, many more things as well. (I’ll be reviewing some of my favorite extensions for Firefox 3 in an upcoming blog post.) And, Firefox is fully open-source, which is always a good thing in my book.

Overall, Mozilla has a true winner with this new version of Firefox. Who knows if I’ll still be using it this time next year, but I’m certainly planning to spend a lot of time with this new beast.

Review: Mozilla Firefox 3
Final Rating:

Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, review, update, web browser, world record