Let us lay out a hypothetical situation for you: You’ve been driving that lumbering old Crown Vic since Ken Starr was culturally relevant. It’s clunky, not particularly fast, and prone to breakdowns, and it lacks any sort of sex appeal. But you’re used to it, and it’s not like you’re made of money, right? Suddenly your benevolent (and extremely wealthy) uncle calls you up and offers you a Tesla roadster. It’s fast, sleek, and technologically advanced, runs without gasoline, and is sexy as all get-out. And he’s giving it to you for free. Do you take it?

Hell yeah, you take it. And if Uncle Mozilla offers you a fast, light, open-source, wildly configurable, sexy web browser, you take that too. Internet Explorer’s a clunker, and if you’ve somehow managed to go the past four years without switching to the roadster that is Firefox, it’s high time to take a test drive. If you’re already a Firefox user, well, here comes your supercharger.

Firefox 3, the latest version of Mozilla’s champion web browser, is on the horizon, and it promises to make the best browser in the world even better. Firefox 3 brings to the table smart bookmarks, more efficient memory usage, a vastly improved location bar, tighter security, and more. Join us as we dig deep into Firefox 3 Beta 5 for a look at the future of web browsing; we’ll show you the features power users should care about and give you tips for getting all that you can from your new favorite browser.

Note: This article was written in late May for the August 2008 issue of Maximum PC, using the most recent release then available, Firefox 3 Beta 5. 

Feature by Feature

Firefox 3 is packed with improvements, but here’s what we’re most excited about!

Security

By now we’re all familiar with the padlock that appears in the location bar to indicate that a site is safe. The trouble is that the symbol doesn’t provide much useful information, such as degree of security, and it can easily be faked—any nefarious site can use a padlock as its favicon (the identifying icon that appears next to a site’s URL in the location bar and tabs) to fool careless users. 

In Firefox 3, the padlock has moved to the status bar, and a site’s security is now represented by color-coding—the area surrounding a site’s favicon in the location bar is colored gray, blue, or green for an at-a-glance security brief. Gray represents no security credentials and green represents the maximum. Clicking a site’s favicon brings up a dialog box containing a similarly colored Passport Officer and all known details about a site’s security: who owns the security certificate, the certifying body, etc. A More Information button reveals encryption level, times visited, what cookies the site has set, and more. In our tests, though, very few sites displayed full credentials—our Internet banking site, for example, didn’t rate a green stamp, even though it’s certified by VeriSign. Instead, we got the slightly less reassuring blue.

Firefox 3 also features a community-contributed database of malware and phishing sites, similar to IE7’s. Click a link to a site in the database and you land on a Firefox interstitial page warning you that the site you’re trying to visit has been deemed questionable. Community-based security is only as good as the community, of course, but it’s a nice addition. We don’t typically run into malware or phishing sites, but anyone who keeps a neophyte’s PC running is sure to appreciate this extra line of defense.

Interface Improvements

Firefox 3 packs a lot of interface and usability tweaks, both subtle and obvious. On the subtle end of the spectrum, you’ll notice tighter graphical integration with the OS. Firefox’s updated UI uses OS-specific text boxes and UI cues to emulate native applications. Nothing earth-shattering here for Windows users—indeed, the new keyhole-shaped back/forward buttons are the only difference we noticed. But Linux and OS X fans have reason to cheer—the browser is especially good looking on a Mac.

Session Saving, which allows you to preserve the sites you have open in your tabs and windows when you close Firefox, lets you save your browser’s state every time you close Firefox, not just when the browser crashes. When you close Firefox 3, you’ll be asked whether you want to save and quit or just quit. If you choose the former, you’ll return to the same tabs next time you open Firefox.

The Download Manager also gets a tune-up: Downloads can now be paused, resumed, and saved between sessions, and you can even copy a download link to the clipboard—useful if you want to send a link to a pal or redownload a file later.
We also like the less-obtrusive Password Manager. Now, instead of opening a dialog box when you input a new username/password combo, the Password Manager opens in toolbar form at the top of the page.

Bookmarks

While it isn’t apparent at first glance, the bookmark menu gets a total overhaul in Firefox 3. It’s designed for people who don’t count creating precisely cataloged browser bookmarks as one of their life goals. In short, bookmarks are now taggable entries in a database instead of untagged entries in a flat text file. Tag your morning trawl through the blogosphere with “mornings” and find them all at once. Tag your comics with “comics.” Tag MaximumPC.com with “awesome.” Bookmarking is easier, too—just click the star in the location bar to add a page to your bookmarks, then click it again if you want to edit the description, add tags, or sort it into a folder.

Firefox 3 also introduces Smart Bookmarks, which use the new Places library to group bookmarks automatically, similar to iTunes’s Smart Playlists. Default Smart Bookmarks include your top 10 most visited sites, recently bookmarked sites, and recent tags, but you can customize them to your particular tastes. Your top sites reset every time you clear your browsing history, which can be good or bad—nobody, least of all you yourself, should know the extent of your Perez Hilton addiction.

AwesomeBar

The new location bar is dubbed the AwesomeBar by users and developers alike. After mucking around with it for a while, we can confirm that it is, indeed, awesome. Your location bar is now a high-powered search bar—just start typing to see it in action! In Firefox 2, the location bar drop-down shows only page URLs and titles. In Firefox 3, results include favicons, tags, and bookmarks (as well as full URLs and titles).

Search results are sorted by “frecency”—a hybrid of “frequency” and “recency”—based on how recently you’ve visited the sites, how often you’ve visited, whether the sites are bookmarked and tagged, etc. You can even use multiword searches: Typing “vigilante penny comic,” for example, brought up a specific Penny Arcade comic we visited yesterday—based on the page title, the URL, and our bookmark tag for the site. For more on the “frecency” algorithm and how you can make it work for you, check out our power-user tips on the next pages.