Mozilla Firefox 3 Features Screencast

An anonymous reader points to a mention at MozillaZine of "a screencast by Mozilla developer Mike Beltzner, demonstrating some of the new features in Mozilla Firefox 3, which is due out very soon. Weighing in at under four minutes, the screencast gives a concise overview of why you should be excited about Firefox 3. Due to its visual nature, the screencast shows Firefox's features far more clearly than the many written previews that have been published. A picture really is worth a thousand words."

Grr sidebar history

[Brian Gordon]

I'm really annoyed by the new popup history/bookmars panel. Having the history open in the sidebar by default was fantastic and if you used "Sort by Last Visited" (which you should) then you can type in kittens or whatever and find it, just like the guy did with the 'awesome bar' in the demo.

2%? really?

[spazdor]

I am a seasoned Linux maven, and Flash playback works perfectly for me.

Just saying.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[snl2587]

Having the history open in the sidebar by default was fantastic...

It does if you go to View->Sidebar->History (or Ctrl+H). It's slightly different to get to it, but roughly the same otherwise.

Personally, I like the database structure implemented by FF3. Especially the speed of reviewing the history and the "awesome bar".

SVG animation

[gr8_phk]

Ever since I started using SVG with Firefox 1.5, I've been waiting for animation capability. The SMIL patch is apparently working reasonably well, but it's just not getting applied to 3.0. This is really sad. I appreciate all the bug fixes and performance improvements, but it's really frustrating that plugins always seem to get higher priority than web standards. Just apply the patch guys. Thanks.

Re:Great!

[FudRucker]

my bookmarks number in the thousands, but what i did was moved bookmark.html to /home/$USER out of my profile directory and open it with a text editor and remove all the meta tags and "last visited" info and left it basically as a html file with only URLs in it and made my bookmark.html my home page so the browser has no bookmarks internally and the home button opens my bookmarks like a regular web page, if you know html pretty good you can make some tables and/or horiziontal lines and categorize them...

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Splab]

The awesome bar is pretty fucking annoying to say the least. In the last 8-10 years when I've been surfing I've been typing the first part of the domain I wanted to visit and the auto complete would show it. So if I wanted to go to slashdot I just type s and arrow down and slashdot would be the first link since its my most visited site with S in the beginning. If I wanted to go to sinfest I'd go si and arrow down - this behavior has to change with FF3, now the browser will popup the most visited site with S in it - and that isn't necessarily slashdot.

Yes this might be a nifty feature for some, but seriously, please stop changing interface behavior! Windows does it all the time and it is driving hordes of supporters nuts. Keep it consistent and let people with special needs enable it - or at least do it the WinZip way; ask the user what he or she wants! (FF3 is default browser with hardy heiron - thats why I'm actually using it, downgrading a package usually leads to nightmares and I just want an OS that isn't in the way of my work - All other OS I got is running FF 2 and is staying that way till I figure out how to make FF3 behave like FF2)

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[owlnation]

Wow, the summary is totally right for once - watching the screencast makes the features actually seem desirable.

Not sure I'd go quite that far... however, I am less concerned about some of the new features now. The name "awesome bar" and the description of what it did had me worried. Originally it looked like a feature for a feature's sake, with a stupid name to boot.

Now, I admit I am more open minded about the Bar (except the name, that remains stupid). I'm open to seeing how it behaves in practice. If the searchable aspects of it are returning good results then maybe it's useful. If, however, it's like the built-in dictionary in Fx 2 that seems only to recognize words in Webster's 1893 edition, then it may be beyond irritating.

But, the Site Identity thing -- and it recognizing how may times you've visited a site, looks like a whole bundle of trouble waiting to happen. At best a divorce, and at worst a 1st class ticket to Gitmo when they impound your laptop at an airport check-in and you forgot to clear it.

I'm also thinking the fact that this changes color might be potentially distracting and irritating. Almost all of the extensions I add to Firefox are about stopping things distracting me on a webpage or browser. I'm not MTV generation, I need to focus when I read, and I only use a browser to read (and for pr0n too obviously, but I don't want distracted then either).

Re:Grr sidebar history

[fmoc-86]

If you really care that much, you can use "s" as a keyword for slashdot.org if you have it bookmarked in FF3.

Browser is your desktop!

[sas-dot]

Its going to be a wonderful tool to tag the files, folders in the hard drives locally and retrieve them back using the awesome toolbar. Many a times i keep all the files i am working on the desktop, then i organize them into folders, and put a shortcut to the folder on the desktop to retrieve it fast. But firefox 3 might change the way i am going to organize. I always wonder when the browser would become the desktop, this is one step more towards it.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[prestomation]

One word, Stealther [mozilla.org]

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Lennie]

Maybe you should use a different profile (-P option in startup), that way you could also install all the extensions listed at the pornzilla-site.