This is my second posting on the Mozilla Firefox web browser which continues to gain popularity by leaps and bounds. It is undoubtedly the first (and arguably only, with due respect to Opera and Apple Safari) browser to seriously challenge the hegemony of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) since the days when Microsoft trounced Netscape Navigator (now part of AOL) to become the undisputed leader of the web browser market.
Indeed, as per the latest statistics made available by W3C,
Firefox now commands over 40% of the web browser market share, which is
a rather commendable effort considering Mozilla was directly up against
the financial and strategic "muscle" of the mighty Microsoft
Corporation itself, which has never shied from using its strength to
either destroy its competition (as in the case of Netscape) or gobble
it up.
My emphasis in this article will be on the enhancements
and new features made available as part of Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0
release. I have been using Firefox 3 right from the day of its release
and have personally observed or verified most of the points I have
mentioned below.
Following are some of the salient new enhancements in Firefox 3:
Functionality (relevant for ordinary users):
- Noticeably faster web browsing due to reduced web page loading times. Thanks to
significant architectural improvements, the overall time to load a web
page along with images, Flash content, etc. is much lower as compared
to IE or even the previous version of Firefox. Also, the Firefox
program itself also takes very little time to load as compared to IE,
since it’s not as resource-hungry as the latter.
- Hugely reduced memory usage, compared to Firefox 2 and certainly to IE 7 (see the shocking comparison at https://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage). With Firefox, you will notice a
significant improvement in your computer’s performance over IE even if you have
several tabs open.
- New ’smart’ Address Bar, which is basically a search engine in itself. It
works as follows: instead of storing only visited web page addresses
(URLs) in the browser cache, which is what all browsers did uptil now,
Firefox 3 stores the URL and
the title of the web page in its cache. So, instead of typing a portion
of the URL in the address bar and letting the browser match it with
URLs in its cache, you can enter a part of the URL and/or the page
title (which is usually easier to recollect) and Firefox does a lookup
in its cache and displays the results to you.
For instance, if you want to go to the Yahoo! Mail website, you need not type https://mail.yahoo.com
if you’ve already visited it before from that computer; instead you
could just type "yahoo mail" and Firefox would list that URL and other
matches for your typed string in its search results below. Similarly,
instead of typing https://vijaypadiyar.in/blogs/index.html
to get to my blog (title: Vijay Padiyar’s Personal Blog), you could
just type in "vijay personal blog" and let Firefox fetch my URL for you.
- Improved Download Manager with support for resuming downloads, so you don’t have
to worry about starting downloads from scratch after a program crash or
a network connection reset. This eliminates the need to install
specialized Download Managers like Download Accelerator Plus.
- Improved customization support with thousands of add-ons,
themes and plugins. Also, finding and installing add-ons hardly takes a
minute or two and couldn’t be simpler! You can view, configure and
manage your add-ons, themes and plugins by clicking on Add-ons under
the Tools menu.
Some of the useful add-ons that I use are FoxyTunes (which allows you to
control any media player from your browser’s status bar), Image Toolbar
(similar to the image toolbar in IE 6), IE Tab (which allows you to
view a web page as it would appear on IE) and Fission (animated
Vista-style progress bar merged with the address bar). I also use the
Vista-aero theme which makes Firefox looks exactly like IE 7.
- Session Save & Restore feature: In the event of a program crash or restart
(say, after an upgrade), this feature saves and restores your open web
pages (including typed text,
in case you were typing an email!) and even resumes in-progress
downloads, so you can literally continue from where you were
interrupted! This is another very useful feature that was earlier
available as an add-on but has now been integrated into Firefox 3.
Also, the related Save & Quit feature allows you to save all open tabs
when you try to close the Firefox program, so you can restore the
session later.
Thirdly, the related Restore Closed Tabs feature
allows you to restore accidentally closed tabs. In fact, you can reopen
any of the last 10 closed tabs from the History menu.
- Built-in Feed Reader that allows you to add feeds and stores them as "Live
Bookmarks" in the Bookmarks menu.
- Integrated Web Search bar allows you to do a web search without opening a search
engine page.
- Improved Bookmarks Organizer that makes managing bookmarks more convenient.
Security (relevant for security-conscious users):
- Built-in protection from online viruses and spyware. Firefox maintains a
continuously updated list of malicious sites and alerts you via a
full-sized browser message when you try to visit any website or URL
classified as malicious.
Built-in pop-up blocker that allows you to choose which sites to block pop-ups from.
Numerous security add-ons are available to block flash objects, ads/banners,
etc. from running without the user explicitly clicking on them. Some of
the most popular ones are AdBlock Plus, FlashBlock, etc.
- Improved ’phishing’ protection. Firefox
2 protected users against phishing by maintaing a database of known
forged sites (updated every 30 minutes) and throwing up a warning page
in case a user clicks on any such URL. In Firefox 3, additionally, the
site’s security certificate can be viewed by clicking on the site’s
favicon (the icon next to the URL in the address bar) and it’s
legitimacy can be ascertained.
Automatic updates for the browser and add-ons, to make sure that you’re protected against the latest threats.
Better integration with the computer’s antivirus software to check downloaded files for viruses. Once again it negates the need for a specialized Download
Manager.
- Improved Password Manager that no longer
appears as a pop-up box, but is displayed at the top of the page just
under the tab bar after logging in.
To summarise, Firefox has all the
advantages of IE and more, without the associated security risks, program stability issues and memory requirements.
Firefox has also taken adequate care to ensure that a
first-time user migrating from IE does not have to face any hassles
whatsoever. The Firefox setup automatically imports your bookmarks,
browsing history, home page(s) and other saved settings from IE, so you
need not have to worry about transferring them yourself.
Firefox is available at https://mozilla.org/firefox.
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