Firefox 3: My Selective Review

14 days and counting – Firefox 3 has managed to surprise me on more than a few levels. When I first downloaded it, I assumed it was just going to be another of those updates you can hardly notice the changes that has taken place. Now, this is not a personal affront to those who work on making this enigmatic browser more secure than ever, but then as an interaction designer, I am usually more into how the browser works with users.
Let’s mention the inline search yet again. When I last mentioned the search capability, I was already in love with it since I never had to use my mouse even once to invoke the inline search.

Now, while you’re typing a search keyword, Firefox highlights any words that start matching the characters being typed in. Simple addition, yet very useful for those of us who tend to do a lot of web research.

Now, on to bookmarking. My usual method of doing research involves me finding relevant articles, bookmarking them into a folder for deeper review later. This usually is a repetitive process that accumulates several links in the same folder. In the older versions, Firefox usually presented a list of all the folders for the user to choose when the folder dropdown is selected. Although this might save the user a single click, more time might be wasted scanning a longer list of folders. With Firefox 3, the dropdown menu presents a list of “frequently used folders” in the dropdown – making it easier for users who bookmark habitually.

Along with this improvement, each bookmark can be tagged. In my case, when I go through my research folder to review my collection of new knowledge, I simply add tags like “read” to indicate which ones I have read.

Now, what don’t I like about it? The location bar! I get it, it searches the history, the bookmarks, and it’s better than ever. But how the results are displayed throws me off a little. Since I use Firefox mainly for development, my location bar is peppered with really long urls that render the resulting list rather unreadable. Since I am also an avid reader of CNN, here’s a sample of my location bar’s result for “cnn”. With the long page titles, the information displayed is rather cluttered and nothing jumps out at me.

So, what’s the verdict? 14 days into this much sexier browser(nice skinning job Firefox team), I am still learning the little delights it provides and I am still very much into Firefox.