Living Critic

The Firefox team says that the current Firefox 3.0 beta 5 is ready for the average user.

I’m one usually to begin testing a beta much earlier but I jumped in on beta 4.  This may sound completely irrelevant but as a Mac user I very much welcome the new theme default for ff 3.  It fits in much better with the rest of OSX.

•  Zoom: The new zooming tool is awesome and actually zooms in on a page and scales (bigger, or smaller) everything instead of just enlarging text as in previous versions.
• Better downloading tools: Now if your connection gets reset for whatever reason it’s easier to go back and resume the download.
• Save your place: Instead of just bookmarking a group of tabs, you can “save” the pages you have open, to reopen them next time you start Firefox.
• Find bookmarks quickly:  The address bar has been converted to a search tool that searches your history and bookmarks as you type.  It even searches your tags and descriptions.
• Speed: While it may not be as fast as Safari 3.1, this new version of Firefox is seeing speed improvements over previous versions.
• Memory: I’ve always been frustrated by Firefox’s memory issues.  It used to, after some time, take over a lot of system memory and all I could do was to quit and restart.  I haven’t seen those problems yet with this new beta.

I’m currently mostly enjoying browsing my RSS feeds in the bookmarks sidebar.  I’m one of those people who would rather read a post on directly from the site it was published on.  I want to have a good sense of the context (ads and all) it was published in.  Depending upon the feed when I’m looking in Google Reader, Thunderbird, or another RSS reader, I’m left often with incomplete posts.  I realize this isn’t nearly as portable of a solution as GoogleReader is, and I appreciate beging able to loging to GR with my cell phone, but on my computer I want to see the full post, and Firefox Livebook marks makes that easier.  When bookmarking an RSS feed, Firefox considers it a live bookmark, and puts new posts into a folder under the name of the feed.  I can then browse through the different feed folders reading posts one by one.

One thing I’m missing with this that I enjoy through other sources is the ability to go through and read only read unread posts sorted by time posted for all the feeds I subscribe to.  As far as I know with FF 3.0 I’m stuck browsing feed by feed.  Another feature I miss that I enjoy in Thunderbird, is the ability to drag particular posts to a folder to save, or read later.  I could make some kind of bookmark folder to do this I suppose, but it’s not nearly as easy to manage as Thunderbird makes it as if it was just another mail message.

RSS fetish aside, Firefox 3.0 has many changes over the previous version, and really the new theme default is a huge improvement for OSX users.   I’d suggest checking it out.