Mozilla Firefox 3.0 review

After a period of stagnation led by Microsoft's lacklustre Internet Explorer, web browsers have finally seen some innovation in recent years.

Now that even IE7 just about follows the same standards as everybody else, browsers are no longer differentiated so much by their basic ability to display websites, and features are increasingly important. The already clever Firefox gains a slew of noteworthy enhancements in this major revision.

Oddly enough, it's the humble address bar that most excited us. The changes don't seem huge at first, but massively enhance usability and safety. For example, cautious users will welcome the display of website IDs when visiting secure sites. Designed to cut down on 'phishing' (where fake sites entice you to enter personal data), each site's ID is highlighted and a drop-down gives further information. Malware protection is also built in, providing a configurable blocking screen for sites that are known to try to attack users' systems.

Better still is the location bar's autocomplete function, which is the best we've seen, drawing a filtered list from your bookmarks and browser history to offer to complete an Internet address as soon as you start typing it. This also works in tandem with Firefox's tagging feature, enabling you to use keywords to retrieve specific sites.

Bookmarking is another area in which Firefox 3 excels. Just as operating systems are moving away from relying on files and folders and towards organising and finding information using tagging and searches, Firefox wants users to stop having to worry about organising bookmarks into groups. Click the location bar's star icon and you get an Edit panel where you can name and tag a bookmark. Autocomplete finds results based on your tags, URLs and keywords, wherever they may be.

Another feature worthy of investigation is Smart Bookmark Folders. This enables you to save searches in the bookmarks library as a folder that dynamically updates. Firefox includes a 'most visited' example, and it's easy enough to create your own. Sadly, this feature is a rare weak spot in Firefox 3: it isn't obvious enough what you have to do, and there doesn't appear to be any means of editing smart folders.

Flexible friend

Elsewhere, the strong focus on usability is again more apparent. There's been a clear speed bump with this release, and the whole thing feels snappier. If you quit while windows are open, Firefox asks whether you want them saved, and zoom options now enable you to zoom the entire page (as in Opera and Internet Explorer), although a text-only option remains. Power users should be impressed with Firefox's discontinuous text selection: select a chunk of text, hold Ctrl and select text elsewhere to cut and paste it at the same time.

The password manager has also been improved. Rather than intrusively flinging pop-up dialog boxes in your face, it appears inline above the page you're viewing, so you can deal with it when you want to.

All these good things come in addition to Firefox's existing feature set, which was already impressive. And while version 3 doesn't quite achieve perfection, mostly due to a few slightly disappointing features (the lack of robust built-in ad blocking remains irksome, and smart folders should be more flexible), its extensibility via plug-ins ensures you're rarely more than a few clicks away from a solution. This, in combination with the focus on usability, has again pushed Firefox ahead of the pack.

Author: Craig Grannell