Yesterday finally saw the release of Firefox 3. It's been a while since Firefox 2 was released (over a year and a half now), so this has been a long time in coming.
Whilst 3.0 is definitely a significant improvement over 2, i don't really see that it's one and a half year's worth of improvement.
In terms of themes, like the release of 2.0, I initially strongly resisted the new theme. I only had to put up with it because the author of my previously used theme, Winestripe (the 1.5 theme that I had used for 2.0), hasn't - and probably isn't - going to update it for 3.0.
But after using the new default 3.0 Windows theme for the past few days, i've got to say that it's really grown on me. I'm probably actually going to stick with it now.
I've done a general clean up of my extensions and also added a few new ones. I've got to give a special shout-out to the developer of the NoSquint extension for doing some great work keeping it up to date and integrating it very well into the new version (which i'm sure couldn't have been easy).
NoSquint is one of those extensions that provide the most basic of functionality that makes you wonder why the Firefox developers themselves don't put it into the browser.
One of the things that NoSquint enables you to do is to change the new default 'zooming' behaviour of the browser back to the normal text resizing of old, whilst still giving you the ability to 'page zoom'. I'm not a fan of 'full' or 'page' zooming (that enlarges images etc as well as text) as a default for various reasons, but I won't bore you with the details.
The new 'AwesomeBar' also does take some getting used to. I felt that it really only became useful once I cleared my history and cleaned out most of my useless bookmarks.
It also seems that, like IE7, Firefox is coming down hard on certificate errors. In the new version it is quite a few clicks to get past common certificate errors, for example self-issued certificates and domain name mismatches. This is a huge (and quite brave) step, and it's really well discussed in explained in one of the developer's blogs, in an entry aptly titled entry 'To Do: Break Internet'.
I can see both sides of this one, but if it makes domain and website administrators take certificate errors more seriously, then it can only lead to a more safer and secure internet.
But all in all, I highly recommend that you upgrade to Firefox 3 (from Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer ;)).
I hope you contributed to the world record attempt!!
Yes I did, about 3 times! (I wonder if they counted multiple downloads from the same IP address as more than one download...
I'm of the impression that they were counted in the original count, but will not be included in the world record...
so I downloaded it at work, home and parents place!!