InfoWorld had a nice post of 5 things to love about Firefox 3. Here are my comments on the lovely things of Firefox 3.

1. Much better performance

Mozilla developers borrowed some memory management tricks from the Free BSD operating system for the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox. (They say memory management on Macs already worked pretty well.) The effect is clear. The browser is much less likely to commandeer too many system resources. And Firefox’s developers worked to make sure that add-ons, notorious memory thieves, don’t cause problems either. They’ve rolled in cycle collectors that help prevent extensions from locking up RAM and not giving it back. They’re also distributing tools to third-party developers that will help them build more abstemious add-ons.

This is the best news I’ve heard of on Firefox development over years. Memory consumption of Firefox has always irritated me — right now I can see nearly 300 MB RAM is being allocated for Firefox 2 only!

2. The “Awesome Bar”

OK, so the official name is the Location Bar, the field where you enter URLs you want to visit. But beta testers have nicknamed it the Awesome Bar and it is, well, pretty awesome. Enter text in the Location Bar and a drop-down list appears of pages from your browsing history that include that text, not just in the URL, but in the page title or the page’s tag (see No. 4 below). The list even includes Gmail messages that include that word in the subject line. If you’ve already visited a Web page, there’s a good chance it’s useful to you. The Location Bar lets you very quickly search that useful subset of the Web.

I’ve got many URL I cannot remember exactly and therefore I depend on Firefox to get it after a few first strokes. The “Awesome Bar” sometimes proves very helpful but occasionally it makes me confused. How about you?

3. Can’t miss warnings

…there’s no danger of missing one of Firefox’s new warnings. When you enter the URL of a suspected attack site, Firefox brings up a full-page warning. With a click, you can see a detailed explanation of why the site was blocked. Or you can just click “Get me out of here,” which takes you to Firefox’s start page. If you really want to live dangerously, there’s a small link that lets you ignore the warning and proceed to the suspect site.

Well, in most of cases, I know the type of site I’m going to visit. Warning is good especially for net newbies however.

4. Better bookmarks

If you like a page, you just click the star in the Location Bar and it’s a favorite. A drop-down box lets you name it, choose a folder to put it in or add a tag to categorize it. Bookmarks (and your browsing history) are now stored in a database, which means you don’t have to spend so much time organizing bookmark folders. You can perform detailed searches of your bookmarks, then save that search as a special folder. Any new bookmarked page that fits the criteria automatically goes in the folder.

Yes, it looks like a good features but quite advanced for average users, I suppose. Anyway, who is not an advanced user using Firefox for web browsing?

5. Whole-page zooming

If your eyes aren’t what they used to be, it’s nice to bump up the size of text on Web pages, as Firefox 2 will do. But it only changes the text size — the other elements remain the same size. That makes for pages that look like The Incredible Hulk, with words bursting through the boxs and tabs that are supposed to contain them.

The new Firefox magnifies everything on the page equally. Everything remains in proportion, but becomes easier to read. And the next time you visit that page, it’ll display at the same level of zoom.

This is a killer feature (not unique to Firefox however) but it’s another challenge to developer to make application that automatically fits the page using JavaScript for some portions of the page may not scale as desired after many Cltr — +/- strokes.

Happy browsing with Firefox the next!

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