The fox is back

The much-anticipated release of Mozilla‘s latest and greatest browser is finally upon us. And even though this user was unable to download it before the server crash, I was able to do so eventually without a glitch.

Unfortunately for me, I had to head to work straight after installation, so I haven’t spent much time with it. But so far, it seems to be pretty good.

Installation

The Leopard and Windows versions are generally the same, albeit the usual issues you get when installing on a Windows system. Generally, it was pretty quick, although the memory and processing power of your computer will directly affect how your experience will be.

I myself have downloaded the 2 different versions for my actual working environment and my virtual machine, and everything seems to be going well.

The one thing I didn’t like was importing bookmarks. Since I left Firefox 2.5, I was using Camino for all my browsing needs, and its performance was more than I expected. Moving to this new version of Firefox, of course I needed to import my bookmarks.

Soon I realize that although Camino and Firefox are from the same organization, somehow they don’t see each other the same way. I could not import bookmarks directly from Camino. There is probably another solution, but what I did was I exported my bookmarks to the desktop, imported it using Safari, then imported the now Safari bookmarks to Firefox 3.

I did have an experience first running the Mac version though. You see, I have all my browsers inside a stack on the dock for easy access. After installation, I ran the program and while doing so, moved it from the Applications folder to the folder for the stack. I haven’t done anything remotely similar on a Windows machine, but with Leopard, I thought it was pretty odd for the program not to respond. I caught on pretty quick and restarted Firefox and all was well.

The interface

While the new look is quite nice, I have gotten to love the simple and elegant Camino interface. The default setup on Firefox is a tad to populated for me… not something a little customization can’t fix.

So far, I do like the list tabs button on the far right of the tab bar, as well as the non obtrusive reminder / query on whether or not you want to save a password for a specific site. I must admit that at first, I thought it to be an indicator of a blocked popup.

The browsing experience

At the end of the day, Firefox 3 is still just a browser that is trying to get everyone up to standards. There are other options out there such as previously mentioned Camino, Opera, and Safari just to name a few. Whatever your fancy, designers and developers such as myself only wish for one thing: that everyone using the internet should demand for a much better and safer browsing environment.

This latest version of Firefox has gotten me again to spread the word. Let’s hope that this doesn’t become another 2.5. And if you have downloaded Firefox 3, go download your own customized thank you here.

Related posts:

1. Extensions make the browser
2. The third coming
3. The way of the fox
4. Switch to Firefox!
5. Geek out

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