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Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Firefox 3, the Guinness Book of Records, and mobile phones
The Linux distillery Firefox 3, the Guinness Book of Records, and mobile phones | Firefox 3, the Guinness Book of Records, and mobile phones |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Sunday, 15 June 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 The biggest new thing in Firefox 3 is the improved web page rendering engine it builds upon. This subsystem is responsible for taking the raw HTML data from web servers and converting it into meaningful displays. There have been some 15,000 updates to this engine as well as major redesign to greatly improve performance and stability. Hundreds of memory leaks have all been fixed. According to Mozilla popular web apps like Gmail run twice as fast in Firefox 3 than in the current Firefox 2.Such comments aren’t merely platitudes. On the security front, you can click the favicon (ie the little icon representing a web site which appears next to it in the address bar) to see who owns the site as well as the encryption and security state of your connection to that site. Built-in malware protection will warn you if you try to load a site that is known to install viruses, spyware, Trojans or malware. In a similar vein, the content of pages which are believed to be phishing sites will not be shown at all. “Phishing” sites are forged versions of real sites, such as PayPal or eBay or your bank, in an attempt to have you enter legitimate credentials so they can be used by people with malicious intent. Presently, most web browsers will, if they do anything, display a message advising the site is possibly a forgery, and continue to display all the content. If the user ignores, or doesn’t see, the message they are still at risk of fooling for the phishing attempt. It’s a responsible move by Mozilla to simply suppress such pages from loading, and it also means the more tech-savvy among us can recommend Firefox 3 to less knowledgeable family and friends with peace of mind that their exposure to Internet nasties is reduced. Downloads have been made much simpler; a new download manager makes it easier to find just where your downloads went to. A status bar message gives constant updates on how many downloads you have actively working and the estimated time for them to complete. Possibly best of all support is now built right in to let you resume downloads if your web browser is closed or crashes and is restarted, or even if your network connection drops out and is restarted. This is such a huge boon, particularly in the modern world of multi-megabyte music and video. We could go on for some time: add-ons are easier to install, pages can be zoomed in and out – and your zoom settings are remembered on a site by site basis. Open up all the tabs you like, and when you exit Firefox will ask if you wish to save where you were and take it up again in the next session. Bookmarks can be tagged, letting you sort them by many different topics instead of organising by a static set of folders. In addition you now get smart bookmarks, showing your recently bookmarked and tagged pages. The address bar offers auto-complete, finding matches as you type from your history and bookmarks with results ordered by a mix of frequency and recency of visits (Mozilla call this “frecency”.) So that’s the desktop! Now how cool would it be to have this on the go, on your handheld gadgetry too? Read on for the big news! CONTINUED |
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