Firefox 3 launched June 18 and over 8 million people downloaded the new version. As of July 2, there were 28,340,281 total downloads!
I procrastinated at first but after a few weeks, I finally clicked on the download link. And boy, am I glad I did! Let me tell you why:
- Firefox 2.0.0.16 was bogging down my entire laptop (which had 4MB of RAM) when I had 20+ tabs open. 20 tabs? Some of you may think I deserved a slow browser for having that many tabs open. But I always have my address book, calendar, intranet, to do list, NY Times, Twitter, Facebook, Matrix Group Web site and Google analytics open, so 20 is nothing by the time 10:00am rolls around.
- I love, love, love how I can simply type a word or two of a site into the URL bar and Firefox presents a list of possible options, including the title and URL.
- The back button is big and prominent, even bigger than the forward button.
- If I close a tab by mistake, I can find the site quickly by going to History to Show All History or Recently Closed Tabs.
- The Password Manager is more graceful, showing up in a bar above the page, allowing me to remember, not now or never on this site.
- I’m told that Firefox is more secure than ever, protecting me from phishing sites and evil scripts on Web sites.
Firefox Usage Growing
BTW, in case you are wondering, a recent review of Matrix Group client sites shows that Internet Explorer (IE) is used by 70-80% of visitors, with the Netscape browsers (including and especially Firefox) garnering anywhere from 12-20% of the traffic.
The W3Schools site shows Firefox as having much higher penetration among users, up to 41% in June 2008. I guess only few of our association clients and their members are part of that statistics.
Regardless of whose stats you are looking at, Firefox using is growing and in a big way. Check out the review of Firefox by Washington Post Tech Writer Rob Pegoraro who says urges everyone to use Firefox.
My Favorite Firefox Plug-Ins
I can’t blog about Firefox without mentioning my favorite Firefox plugs-in.
I love Pearl Crescent, which lets me take screen shots of complete Web pages, not just the visible portion of the page. I use this to capture screen shots for presentations and proposals.
The Front-End Developers at Matrix Group convinced me to load the Web Developer Toolbar, which lets me easily see the alignment of elements on a page; enable/disable javascript, pop-ups, cookies; see the properties of an image; resize my window to 800 x 600; and edit the html to see what a page would look like with modified html (without updating the actual page on the server, of course). It’s geeky but cool!
I still automatically open up Firefox and IE each morning. I browse client sites in both browsers, but for personal browsing, Firefox is definitely my first choice.
What’s your preference? How many of you use more than one browser?
4 replies on “I Love Firefox 3!”
I like it too, but I’ve got a problem with my webmail from work. When I try to compose an email using the webmail’s HTML editor in Firefox 3, I cannot get a text cursor in the message area of the email that I wish to compose. I can still use the plain text editor, but that’s no fun. Prior versions of Firefox worked. I sent messages to both the website’s customer service and to Firefox’s “Report Broken Website” feature. Website said it’s a bug in Firefox 3 and to use another browser. We’ll see what happens. Curious as to whether anyone else had a problem like htis
I have the exact same problem when copying and pasting text into Blogger (where I host a personal blog)! I can’t get the text to go into the right box in html mode, just plain text mode. Here’s what I do: I copy and paste in text mode, then switch to html mode to format, edit, spellcheck.
The network admins at Matrix Group think the problem has to do with javascript, how it interacts with the WYSIWYG editor, yada, yada.
BTW, a client has also reported problems with some RSS feeds in Firefox 3; it seems some feeds aren’t sorted properly.
Ah well, it’s a free browser and it’s the newest version. You are great to report the problem to Firefox so they know it’s a problem. That’s what we get for being early adopters, right?
That’s a good tip! I’ll give it a try. Thanks Joanna!
Hi, I just instaled mozilla 4, DO NOT CHANGE IT WITH VERSION 3. VERSION 3 IS VEEEEEEEEERY friendly. I love mozilla, except Version 4