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16 Dec 2008
I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix[1], and for the past few major releases, I've been trying to test the beta versions. I grabbed the first 3.1 beta in October, but it was unstable, and some of the features were jarring. The tab switching behavior was a special challenge to my productivity, and the new JavaScript engine (TraceMonkey) was probably a source of a lot of the instability.
Last week, Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 was released, and it's much nicer. I haven't had a single crash yet, and it does feel a bit snappier. And all of the tab switching stuff has been backed out. Us web developers are excited about some new stuff like HTML 5 <video> and <audio> tags, cross-site XHR support, and CSS-like DOM selectors. But besides the speed, I don't think end-users are going to be rushing to this release.
[1] - I'm pretty sure I installed Phoenix 0.3 way back in fall of 2002. Look, you can still get it!
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20 Apr 2008jssh is a Firefox addon that allows you to control your browser through a telnet session.
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13 Mar 2008Add this to your "Why you should be looking forward to Firefox 3" pile
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11 Mar 2008And it seems like the only thing anyone can talk about is the speed.
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31 Dec 2007Some have made the idiotic suggestion that Firefox be renamed to "Netscape" now that AOL has abandoned the latter.
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18 Dec 2007Lightweight theming; fast and simple. It's a great idea, and there's apparently web-driven dynamic theme support right around the corner.
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6 Dec 2007I noticed this when I came back on Tuesday. I like it, but right now it's a bit slower than the old location bar. I hope that's temporary.
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20 Nov 2007Officially, it's only recommended for developers. But I think it's so awesome that anyone who's interested should risk it.
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16 Nov 2007Firefox 3 page zoom
In Firefox 2, zooming just changes the size of text. In Firefox 3, it resizes images, buttons, padding, form elements, everything. View full size to see what it looks like zoomed all the way out.
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15 Nov 2007Firefox 3 location bar autocomplete
Another side-effect of Places is that the auto-complete dropdown is so much faster and so much better at searching your history. Instead of just looking at the start of the URL, it searches through all title and URL substrings. Here, "API" gives me more or less exactly the history results I wanted.
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9 Nov 2007Firefox 3 smart folders
The third in an unbounded set of the things I love about Firefox 3. There's a new backend for history and bookmarks (called "Places") that makes things way faster and easier to do neat things with, like search and statistics. The Page Info dialog's number-of-visits value, for instance, is definitely pulled from there. Firefox 3 also comes pre-configured with some smart folders like these.
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7 Nov 2007Firefox 3 page info dialog
The page info dialog was one of the 2007 Summer of Code projects.
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6 Nov 2007An intro to the best feature in Firefox 3, and a preview into how it's very soon going to be even better.
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6 Nov 2007Firefox 3 file:// listing
RIP unformatted file listings 1994-2007
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31 Oct 2007This is so freaking awesome. I've been following that bug for probably four years.
