Top 10 Firefox 3 Features

With Firefox 3 right around the corner, have you thought about upgrading now? I personally have, but for some reason, the latest version looks incredibly ugly under my Gentoo Linux, on top of having ugly fonts… so I’ve stayed away. On my laptop, though, the latest beta works rather well, so it may very well depend on your distro, which shouldn’t (hopefully) be an issue at launch.

But that aside, Lifehacker loves Firefox 3 and gives us ten good reasons as to why. Their number one feature is a little surprising, as it’s not really a feature, but rather a performance increase. The sad thing is that 2.0 was so inefficient, it’s hard to not agree with them. Other new favorites include a revamped add-on manager, smarter location bar, native looks for each OS (which I’ve not seen apparently) and a streamlined “remember password” feature.

I admit that I’m still not blown away by FF 3, and at this point, I’m really unsure whether I will upgrade when the final stable version is launched. I personally haven’t seen huge performance increases, nor have I found the new features entirely useful, but I admit I haven’t given them that much of a chance. Another reason might be the fact that FF 3 seems to be the last of their priorities anyway, so I guess it should be somewhat expected. Hopefully my beefs are just that… mine only.

Your browser is a serious part of your computer time, so having it look like nothing else on your system can be seriously annoying. Firefox’s designers made system integration a priority with this release, and it shows-even Windows XP’s and Vista’s button layouts have subtle differences in color and shading. There’s differences at deeper levels, too, with Cover Flow-type styling in the add-ons manager for OS X, transparencies in key places in Vista and OS X, and other tweaks that make your browser feel like a natural extension of your system.

Source: Lifehacker