Firefox 3 Beta 2 - faster and easier to navigate

By Stan Beer
Thursday, 20 December 2007 03:00

Opinion and Analysis

I've just downloaded and had a casual fool around with Firefox 3 Beta 2 and I'm told that it has approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. However, what it boils down to is that it's even faster than the Beta 1 version and it is even easier to navigate.

In its release notes, Mozilla makes a song and dance about the improved security features of Beta 2 - restricting cookies to a single domain, protection against JSON data leaks and so on. No doubt, these are among the most important aspects but the thing you'll notice as a user, aside from the speed increase over previous versions, is the smart way that it enables you to get to websites with a minimum of typing.

Unlike previous attempts at predicting where you want to go, this latest beta really does a pretty darned good job of remembering and discerning your surfing habits. When you type in the first couple of letters of the website, it not only guesses which site you might want to visit it actually seems to associate other relevant sites you've visited and presents them as options also.

For instance, if I type "Linu" into the toolbar, it does a search on all the previous stories about Linux I've read and brings up the most recent. It doesn't just bring up a list of the URLs but a description of the site and the story - very handy. I find that I now rarely have to type in a complete URL unless it's a place I've never visited.

Another new feature that makes navigation easier is the bookmarks toolbar. If you have a page that you visit very frequently, you can simply drag and drop the link on to a bookmarks toolbar at the top of the screen.

The Firefox design team has obviously put a lot of thought into helping users remember and find the pages that they want to visit. CONTINUED