Brain Drippings

Firefox, the alternate browser of choice, has released a fairly major update this week, bumping their version from 3.0.11 to 3.5. The new version, to me, seems a lot more like Safari 4. The tabs tear off the tab bar into new windows exactly like Safari 4, even down to a little mini-preview of the window. The speed is similar to Safari, although for most tasks Safari 4 still feels snappier.

The advantage that Firefox still has over Safari (And Internet Explorer just isn’t in the same league, so no sense mentioning it) is its extensible nature. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of plugins for Firefox that let you customize the browser in ways that go far beyond just the look. Download managers, Web Design utilities, Bookmark synchronizers, weather alerts, iTunes controls, and even tools that let you, actually edit the source of web pages before they are displayed. The customizability of Firefox is second to none, and it is this advantage that most people cite as the main reason they chose Firefox over other browsers.

But there are other things that Firefox does very well.  Adam Engst refers to the address bar in Firefox as the “Awesome Bar” (with quotes). I have no idea if that is his coinage or the real, official name of Firefox’s address bar, but it’s the perfect name for it. If you’ve used Safari 4’s new history search you might think it is very cool and useful, but since it requires opening the history window from a menu (replacing your current window with the history) and then accessing the search field in the upper right, or opening a new tab, waiting for the Top Sites to load, then clicking “Search history” in the lower right, it turns out to be pretty cumbersome and slow.

In Firefox, when I start typing in the address bar Firefox is searching every URL in my bookmarks or my history, and it is searching in the full text of the URL and the Title of the site the URL is pointing to. For example, here is the drop-down I get when I type “Firefox” in the address bar:

Firefox's Address Completion

Notice that the first option is, as expected, Firefox.com. But then notice that the second option has “Firefox” nowhere in the URL at all. The text appears only in the Title of the page. In the third option, ‘firefox’ appears in the path of the URL. In Safari 4 (with the same bookmarks and history) the results are very different, and far less useful:

Safari 4 Address Completion

This specific feature in Firefox is not new to 3.5, but it feels snappier in 3.5, and feels smarter (recent history items come up at the top more consistently).

Firefox 3.5 also supports “Open Video” a new plugin-free video standard that is part of HTML5. However, it only supports the Ogg Theora video and has completely ignored h.264 (also known as MPEG-4). This is a big mistake as h.264 is used much more commonly that Ogg Video. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

Firefox also introduces improved privacy settings, making it trivial to completely erase all traces of your browsing session. They advertise this using an example of “Buying a present” but we all know this is for worry-free porn browsing.

I don’t understand how anyone can stand to share a login session with someone else in the first place, so my browsing history is already private as no one else gets to login as me and ‘borrow’ my session. Even if someone wants to ‘look something up real quick’ I use fast-user-switching to login to the Guest Account or their own user account. It’s fast and painless and takes no longer than it takes me to get out of my chair. So for me, the privacy features are meaningless.

The biggest feature of the new 3.5 version is the speed. Granted, Safari 4 still feels a bit snappier overall, but FF3.5 is no slouch, even with a few addons installed. One of the best tests of browser speed I’ve found is gmail, and FF3.5 is a lot more capable here than 3.0.11 was. The whole gmail interface is noticeably faster.

Upgrading to 3.5 is recommended for all users. On the Mac it requires 10.4 or higher. System requirements for other systems are quite low; for Windows, Firefox will run on Windows 2000 or newer and 64MB of RAM.