Firefox 3

Codenamed Gran Paradiso, Firefox 3 was released on 17 June 2008. It saw a record of 8.9 million downloads within 24 hours after its release. Powered by the Gecko 1.9 Engine, Firefox 3 uses less system resources and renders pages faster. It is the best browser available till date, with over 15,000 improvements as stated by Mozilla. Firefox 3 behaves as a native application depending on your operating system, unlike Firefox 2, which had same interface for all OS.

The startup time of Firefox 3 has been considerably reduced. The performance remains consistent even if large number of tabs are opened. Switching tabs is faster than previous versions. Firefox 3 is a very stable browser allowing you to use it for hours without failure. The memory leaks present in previous Firefox releases have been resolved. Firefox 3 relies on Google for malicious sites that can harm your system, or suspected forgery and phishing sites. Inclusion of Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer certificate support (EV SSL) adds another dimension to security provided by Firefox 3. It shows a green button when you visit a website with an EV SSL certificate, this enables checking of site owner’s ID, connection encryption.

Another feature of firefox is that it asks if it should save recent tabs for next session, an improvement over the previous versions that asked if it should close all the tabs. Before the RSS icon and after the URL is the new Star icon which on clicking once stores the page's URL as a bookmark, on clicking twice you may store the bookmark in a new or existing folder.

The improved zoom in enlarges the whole page not just the text. A complete rearrangement of layout, controls, buttons, CSS design elements as well as images expressed in percentages scales takes place. The Add-ons manager has been improved with the integrated ability to browse, search, install extensions and themes from within the add-ons manager itself. The download manager can now resume pending or paused downloads, tell which site a particular download came from and show download statistics in the status bar. The password manager doesn't pop-up, it just displays a 'remember password' notification at the top of the page.

The offline support feature enables offline access to your online content and web applications. This allows you to make changes offline and when you go online again, Firefox 3 synchronize any changes made. For those pressed by bandwidth limit like me who has a 1 GB download limit, there is an option to block pictures, which consume the largest bandwidth. It is also possible to block Java and JavaScript. Blocking JavaScript is a bad option though as it reduces functionality of many websites. But you may safely block Java, and enable it as and when required.

The best is that Firefox 3 is available in 45 different languages. There are several addons in Firefox to increase your productivity. Being an internet junkie, the one I keep an eye on frequently tracks my internet usage time. Other one shows the coding of the website etc. For more list of Addons to spice up your surfing, keep visiting this blog.

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