Is Firefox 3.0 RC1 worth it?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 19 May 2008 18:07

Opinion and Analysis

I’ve been playing with Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1, and by the looks of it, things bode well for its June release, but it still faces stiff competition from IE7, Opera 9.5 and Safari 3.

Although not yet officially available as a final release, many around the world have been playing with one of a number of different Firefox 3 betas over the past few months.

Now that Firefox 3 has reached its first release candidate status, suggesting there could well be another before the code goes ‘gold’, even more people are likely to give it a go.

One of the ‘new’ features that Firefox 3.0 beta users have experienced for some time now is the ‘Smart Location Bar’. This has also been dubbed as the Awesome Bar, and depending on who you ask, it’s either a brilliant feature, or a waste of time.

The way it works is when you start typing a web address into your address bar.

Instead of just a series of addresses popping down matching the first letters after “www.” as seen in Internet Explorer, the Smart Location Bar starts showing you web addresses where the text being typed matches – no matter where that text appears in the web address.

So, if you start typing in “am”, which could be from, say www.amaze.com, instead of www.amazon.com, but you have also visited www.namaste.com and www.wham.com in the past, you’ll see those four addresses (and any others with “am” in the address) – until, of course, you start typing even more letters which filters the drop down list even further.

It also finds the name of web sites – not just their addresses – in the same manner. So, if a website is called “Amazing Widgets” that you’ve visited in the past, but has a web address that is, say, www.widgets.com – the Amazing Widgets website will appear in the drop down list too.

This is meant to help you quickly find the address you’re looking for from your past surfing activities, and in the main, I’ve found it to be a very useful addition.

While the text in the Smart Location/Awesome Bar previously had a black heading and a green link, at least in the Windows Vista version (which I am using), this has changed in Firefox 3.0 RC1 to a black heading with a blue link.

The new Opera 9.5 beta 2 – soon to be released as a final gold code too – has a similar bar – but actually goes one better than Firefox 3.

Please read on to page 2 to find out – and for more information on what’s new in Firefox 3.0, as well as more information on other Opera browsers, Safari and Internet Explorer 8.