If I was to sum up Firefox 3 in a single word it would be “awesome”.  That is not an overstatement either, only perhaps an understatement.  Although I consider Firefox to be the best web browser, I can also be critical of it - especially in terms of performance.  It has truly been worth the wait as in this release thare are some much needed improvements.

The speed of Firefox has been improved vastly.  Page rendering times, switch between tabs, open menus, improved speed of javascript and the general application speed - especially after it has been open for a few hours.

Dealing with addons has been improved: it is now possible to search for extensions from within Firefox addons dialogue without the need visit the main site and search.

The zoom functionhas also been improved when zooming a page now the images increase in size as well as text.  This is useful for when viewing websites where text and images are both ridiculously small.  It’s still possible to zoom on text only too though.

It’s now possible to choose Yahoo! Mail as the default email client.  It’s a shame that Gmail is not a choice but this can be easily changed through the use of greasemonky scripts.

Overall, it’s a vast improvement and I can now say goodbye to Opera!

It’s not long now until the release of Firefox 3 and Firefox Download Day, which is supposed to be 17 June 2008, although it’s currently not know when this “day” will start. As Mozilla Corp/Foundation is located in Mountain View, California, which is PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) then it’s possible the day will start at 00:00 for that time zone.

I guess what is more likely though is that day means 24 hours and the “download day” will be the 24 hour period from when Firefox is released on 17 June, e.g. if it is released at 17:00 PDT then the 24 hour download period will start from then. Well, at least that makes the most sense to me.

I study eCommunications and one of the latest activities is to study the online (”web”) progress of a news article over a two week period. This is quite a big task so I decided to look for some tools to help make it easier to manage the information. After browsing around the Mozilla add-ons website I found ScrapBook which allows local saving of web pages (or even sites). It is possible to highlight important text, add annotations and make some inline notes before and after saving the page. Furthermore, if you do not what to save all the text then you can just select what is required and save this specific text. It is exactly what I was looking for!

When saving a page, there is the option to specify the type of linked content to save and whether to include style sheets (CSS), images and javascript.

The saved pages/text can be managed similarly to bookmarks in a side bar; they can be renamed and categorised in to folders.

This is definitely an excellent extension for research and I’m sure it would be of great benefit to students. I would give it 10/10 as it does the job well.

I normally do not pay much attention to social news websites as they are usually full of spam or, like digg, do not have the best of communities (but I will reserve my anti-digg feelings for another article). However, I did find a great one Today when checking my referral log.

And the site is: Foxiewire.com. It’s a social news site dedicated to Mozilla/Firefox related topics. It has some great stories on there and I’ve subscribed to their news feed as it seems well worth keeping up with if you are a Firefox user.

There are some stories about new extensions and themes as well as interesting articles. It may not have a huge community yet (i.e. the size of digg’s) and may never will as it is a “niche” website, but there does seem to be a group of users who are submitting on a regular basis and getting involved in discussions, so I am sure the community will continue to grow.

What are you still doing reading this? Visit it now!

The release of Firefox 3 is getting closer. For those of you who have not tried the latest release candidate then I recommend that you do as it has many performance improvements over the current version. Admittedly, you might experience extension compatibility problems, but it won’t be long until the developers release compatible versions, I’m sure.

I love Firefox but have always hated the slow performance after it has been open for a few hours. This is also a reason why I use Opera, too, as it is much more resource-friendly and quicker than firefox 2 (although I’d prefer not to use it at all). Opera is a good browser but it does not have extensions and these are what make Firefox stand far ahead of the competition.

I’m sure Firefox will go on to eat up more of Internet Explorer’s market share once Firefox 3 is released. IE is truly lagging behind many of the alternative browsers available.

I won’t re-invent the wheel by making my own full review but rather recommend the one on MozillaLinks.org, Firefox 3 RC2 review, as it is very good and detailed (screenshots included!). In general, it is a great website for all the latest Firefox news.

Gmail is a great web email service, in my opinion the best out there, and Google have recently made some updates to improve it further. However, there are still some features missing, such as HTML signature. Fortunately, though, there is a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey which allows customisation of a web page through the use of Javascript scripts. The customisations range from changes in the layout (such as removing flash and iframes to help clean up the page) or adding/changing functionality (such as using a web mail service for handling mailto: links).

There are several great scripts available for Gmail. The following are my favourites:

• GMail Addons - allows viewing of Google Calendar while within Gmail and provides an improved Google Chat.
• Ehance Google Cal (requires the above Gmail Addons) - cleans up the Google Calendar page when viewing it within Gmail.
• Mailto to Webmail - allows the use of a webmail service (GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc) as the browser default email client instead of Outlook or Thunderbird.
• De-ad gmail - removes the adverts from the right of emails in gmail.
• Gmail FavIcon Alerts - changes the favicon to notify of new message(s).
• Gmail - Insert HTML Signature - allows a HTML signature to be inserted when composing an email in Gmail.
• Secure Pro and also part 2 - forces Gmail (and some other services such as Facebook and Google Docs) to use encryption (ssl/https)

A screenshot of Gmail with Google Calendar open within it, a blue favicon alert to notify of the new message and my HTML signature: