Featuring Firefox 3 on Mozilla.com…Does This Look Right?
Alix and I are working on the Firefox 3 features content for the redesigned Mozilla.com and would like your input. Our goal is to increase the amount of description and detail (compared to the current site) to give interested parties a better picture of everything that Firefox offers. We plan on listing each feature along with a short description…see below for our list so far.
My question to you is, how does the list look to you? Did we overlook anything? Miscategorize your favorite new feature? Or maybe it’s all exactly perfect already? (wishful thinking, I know)
Take a look and add a comment with your thoughts if you have anything to add. As you read, please keep in mind that 1) this list (and the site in general) is geared more towards the mass audience rather than developers and 2) the wording isn’t final, so don’t worry if you see acronyms or phrases that won’t make sense outside the Mozilla community. Thanks in advance for your help!
Here’s our proposed features list as it currently stands:
Top New Features:
• Awesomebar
• Site identity tool (i.e., Larry)
• Improved performance
• One-click bookmarking
• Full zoom
• Password manager
Security & Privacy
• Anti-malware
• Anti-phishing
• Site identity tool
• Parental controls integration (Vista only)
• Anti-virus integration (Windows only)
• Plug-in version check and disabling
• Secure add-on updating
• Password manager
• Clear private data
• Site-specific security permissions
• Automated update
• Pop-up blocker
Personal
• Awesomebar
• One-click bookmarking
• Library
• Tags
• Smart folders
Productivity
• Pause/resume downloads
• Smart keywords
• Spellcheck
• Session restore
• Live bookmarks
• RSS feed reader RSS preview
• Choice if you want to load images or not
• Platform native look & feel
• Full zoom
Tabs
• Save on exit
• Reopen closed tab
• Drag & reorganize tabs
• Smooth scrolling
Performance
• Improved memory management
• Smaller memory footprint
• Faster page load
• Graphics engine improvements
• Faster Javascript?
• Better DHTML?
Customization
• Thousands of options at AMO
• Fully integrated add-ons manager
• Themes & personas
• Customize: toolbars, search, web protocol handlers, site-specific preferences
Universal Access
• 40+ languages
• Customized per locale (dictionary, search providers, live bookmarks & web feeds)
• Text rendering
• Accessibility
Search
• Integrated web search (including adjustable search window)
• Choose from hundreds of search engines
• “Find in” page
• Search suggestions
Help
• In product help
• SUMO
• Live chat
Standards
• Online application support [email, calendar, etc]…i.e. web-based protocol handlers
• Offline browsing
• Advanced graphic stuff – SVG, Canvas
• Color profile support
• Support for CSS, Acid 2, MathML, EcmaScript 4, APNG, Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest, Microformats
January 14th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
If you haven’t already found this, I recommend Jesse’s “Unofficial Firefox trunk changelog” at http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/trunk-for-firefox-3.html. It lists a lot of the major changes in Firefox 3, so it should help you see if you missed anything.
January 14th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
I’m betting that by “RSS feed reader” you meant “Feed preview page, where you can glance at the content of a feed before dispatching it to your choice of actual feed reader, but you can’t use it as a feed reader, we didn’t design it for that, it’s no good at that, and we’re not going to try to make it one, kthx,” in which case you might want to change that line now, to avoid any risk of misunderstandings creeping in along the line.
Unless, of course, you’ve got an actual feed reader you’re planning on landing before b3, in which case, go you!
January 14th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
We’re not going to support all of ES4 by a long shot, but we do have a preview of some of the features. We should probably make the statement there milder so as not to confuse.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Acid2 is not really a standard, it is just a test. No normal user ought to care about the acid2 test anyway, and as a test its usefulness is questionable. Hyping it lends it, or future test like it, undeserved cachet. Why not mention XHTML support instead?
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You could specifically mention better linux support. Nearly nobody would know what the phrase “platform native” means. I’d try not to use it alone, and only with lots of context.
The bookmark manager is a good feature to mention.
“Choice if you want to load images or not” is a phrase which can charitably be said to be approaching English
… Maybe you could rewrite it and conjugate your verbs: “Choose if you want to load images, or not”, or “Choose whether or not images load”, or, more informally: “Choice of whether images load” or “Choice of whether or not images load”.
January 15th, 2008 at 1:32 am
under “security & privacy”, we now block third-party cookies (i.e. cookies “not from the originating site”) by default – something IE, Opera, and Safari don’t do (but have prefs for). see bug 324397 for the gory details.
January 15th, 2008 at 3:45 am
A lot of those features are existing ones, and it’s hard to tell which ones are new or not. I think a ‘New!’ beside the new ones in the release notes would be useful, either that or a more comprehensive list of new features.
Also, while the code for the password manager has been changed, it’s not really a groundbreaking “new feature” as far as the end user is concerned. I think resuming downloads across browser sessions could replace it. Also the antivirus integration is something end users can understand, so even though it’s Windows-only, it could be a well highlighted new feature.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:09 am
I don’t know if “Awesomebar” is the right word to use towards the mass audience. It doesn’t really tell them anything – I mean, it’s not very descriptive.
January 15th, 2008 at 8:15 am
I took a look at the performance too. I compared FF2, FF3beta2 with Opera 9.25 and Opera 9.50.
> • Improved memory management
> • Smaller memory footprint
Yes. The memory footprint is a lot better. I opened a couple of pages into tabs. FF2 takes 100MB, FF3 75MB, Opera9.25 90MB and Opera9.50 100MB. Looks like FF3 really cuts down the use of memory.
> • Faster page load
Yep. This is true. The performance went really up. I used the Load Time Analyzer Add-on to compare the time to load a large page with tables. And again FF3 wins. FF2 takes 1002ms to load that page, FF3 just 675ms. That’s a pretty huge improvement.
> • Faster Javascript?
That’s the only point, where FF3 didn’t improve much. There’s a JS Benchmark. SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. FF2 takes about 18.8s, FF3 16.7s. That’s a improvemet. But when you take a look at opera it’s still slow. Opera takes only about 11s to finish the test. So there’s still a lot do to reach the fastest browser.
Btw. you can read my review here: Firefox 3, The Next Generation (Unfortunately it’s in German.
January 15th, 2008 at 9:45 am
My results from the SunSpider
Firefox 3 (Build 2008011405)
19147.6ms +/- 6.2%
Opera 9.24
22700.8ms +/- 12.5%
The best run from 2 on each.
So I dunno about the accuracy of that test…
January 15th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I repeated each test ten times and calculated a average
January 16th, 2008 at 10:56 am
There’s the easier way to configure how firefox maps mimetypes to your preferred app (Tools > Options > Applications).
As for improved performance / memory usage, that might be swings and roundabouts. Some things have gotten faster, others slower. For memory usage, I think Fx3 uses more memory when it starts than Fx2, but browsing over longer periods of time, memory usage should be lower.
There’s the new theme coming soon too! And improved stability; certainly wrt loosing bookmarks (SQLite yay!)
January 17th, 2008 at 5:51 am
APNG is definitely not a standard, so it shouldn’t be listed as a supported standard.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:13 am
hey,
I am interested in the W3C on output to printer….with CSS3
Who can tell me more about that?
January 18th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
[...] Featuring Firefox 3 List of new features of firefox 3 (tags: list firefox) [...]
January 21st, 2008 at 11:29 am
Can you post the mock-ups to get ideas or a visual
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
Thanks all, for the helpful comments.
GraphicsGuru, I don’t have any mockups at this point…will post something later when the design is more fleshed out.
February 3rd, 2008 at 5:00 am
windows vista performance tweaks…
haha gotta love Windows……
February 5th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Thanks for your post. We translated the firefox 3 post for the german firefox – blog. thanks.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:41 am
Adderall no doctor….
Adderall no doctor….