Firefox 3: The Browser War Just Got a Lot Hotter

Firefox 3 released to much fanfare Tuesday with millions of downloads, earning the browser a place in the record books — literally. Firefox achieved the Guinness World Record for most downloads in a day. Excitement for the software launch bordered on the ridiculous, with thousands of people attending and hosting Firefox 3 launch parties. But behind all the hype, there really is a great deal of substance. Firefox 3 is fast, stable and packed with features.

The most touted of those features is an addition that developer Mozilla calls the “Awesome Bar.” Firefox’s Smart Location Bar, as it’s also referred to, is like QuickSilver for your browser. Simply navigate to the location field, type a few letters, and matching results are displayed instantly. The bar searches the titles, URLs and tags of pages in your bookmarks and history. Like the all-purpose app launcher QuickSilver, the Awesome Bar learns your usage habits over time, and adjusts the order it displays results based on how frequently you access each. This has proved to be incredibly useful and really has started to change the way I browse. More often I find myself typing a couple letters instead of clicking bookmarks.

Firefox’s bookmark system has also seen a complete overhaul. For simplicity’s sake, a star button is placed directly next to the location bar to quickly save a page. With the inclusion of tags, and a shift away from forcing users to catalog favorites in the traditional folder hierarchy (though, you can still obsessively organize your pages in folders if you like), Firefox 3 marks a long overdue shift to the Web 2.0, del.icio.us way of easily archiving loads of pages using searchable tags. This has also paved the way for Smart Folders — constantly-updated directories — like most-visited pages or frequent bookmark searches.

One feature that didn’t get a much needed revamp, however, is the built-in RSS reader, which is still as worthless as ever. Live Bookmarks treats RSS feeds like folders on the bookmarks bar; when clicking the feed, it opens a drop-down list showing an up-to-date list of headlines. News nuts need look no further than a multitude of extensions that allow feed viewing in a sidebar or in the main window, similar to Safari. And Firefox lets you set any reader, including web-based aggregators like the exceptional Google Reader, as the default for subscriptions. You can even set web-based e-mail clients, like Gmail, as the browser default without any additional software or add-ons. Nifty!

Inline search in Firefox may not be as pretty as Safari’s, but it’s just as usable. By pressing the forward slash key you can quickly search within a page, and even activate links by pressing return or open them in a new tab with command+return. This has helped me limit my use of the mouse immensely. Like Safari, tabs can be dragged around to reorder them, but can’t be ripped away into new windows. Firefox does, however, let you reopen recently closed tabs for those times you accidentally nix the wrong page.

The browser’s password saving feature has also received a slight update, changing the obtrusive pop-up window asking to remember a site’s password to a small slide-out bar. This is a fantastic change that Safari will no doubt need to emulate in a future release, as it allows you to specify whether you want to save the login information after you’ve verified that it’s correct. Often times, I’ll punch in a user name and password combo for a site, save it into my Keychain, and then find out seconds later that the info was for another site, my Keychain now cluttered with the wrong info. (On the topic of little tweaks that go a long way, the ability to select multiple blocks of text is brilliant; just highlight some text, hold command and highlight another block of text elsewhere.)

While the new password handling is a welcome addition, we’re still stuck with Mozilla’s proprietary password manager. Because Firefox remains (and will continue for the foreseeable future) to be coded in Carbon instead of Cocoa, support for the OS X system-wide Keychain, in addition to other features like the services menu and the Mac dictionary, is impossible. You can still get the function of a pop-up dictionary using one of many extensions, but there’s no solution quite as sleek as the Cocoa dictionary.

The new default skin is an improvement over its predecessor, but it still doesn’t match the ubiquity of Safari’s UI. Thankfully the GrApple themes are spot on replicas; so much so that you are bound to mistake a Firefox window for Safari. While the look of the app is more Mac-like, with a prettier interface, improved page rendering and native-looking widgets, the feel isn’t quite there due to the Carbon structure. And with rumors of the next OS X release dropping support for Carbon applications, I would expect Mozilla will soon be stepping up its Cocoa development resources.

Another huge gripe I’ve always had with Firefox is its lack of inline viewing for PDFs, a frustration which seemed to be tied to the Carbon curse. Though Firefox 3 can’t display PDFs within the browser out of the box, it’s Quartz PDF Plugin to the rescue! This extension alleviates one of the biggest turnoffs of Firefox on the Mac.

In terms of speed, Mozilla has really made leaps and bounds. From a nearly instantaneous app launch and much improved memory usage to blazing fast page rendering, Firefox easily keeps stride with Safari and Camino, Firefox’s sister browser built in Cocoa. Firefox 3 also improves JavaScript support, now a staple in Web 2.0 development. Though with Safari 4’s new, much improved JavaScript engine on the way, we are about to enter the browser speed race, where every user will benefit.

Anti-phishing and instant site ID verification are seamless additions that will keep you browsing safely. And to keep your children safe as well, Mozilla has caught up to the party by adding parental controls. However, they failed to copy one of Safari’s better features: private browsing, which enables you to mask your searches and history for a period of time.

Out of the box, Firefox 3 has just as many features, if not more, than any other Web browser on the market. Throw in the seemingly endless sea of third-party extensions to add additional functionality, and you have one super-powered browser. The fact that it’s written in Carbon is really the only significant drawback, leaving your passwords at the whim of Mozilla’s own manager instead of in Keychain where the rest of your OS X login info is kept. Firefox now holds a world record for a reason: it’s a great browser. Give the free download a spin, and let us know in the comments how you think the new version stacks up to the other browsers out there.