Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 was released today, and bringing us even closer to the final release.
I’ve been playing with FF3 since 3.0b1 and I have to say that it is pretty slick, but by far the feature I am hooked on the most is the Location Bar.
Think of it like a simple history search/smart URL entry bar. They have implemented a fancy search algorithm that will rank your results based on frequency, rather than the first one in alphabetical order, as in the past. It appears to search not only the URLs from your history, but also the page titles.
Besides the search functionality, the search results are very well done - each result is in a multi-line form, with the page title and URL on separate lines, colorized in black and green respectively, for readability. The other cool part of it is that it shows the favicon for the result - making it easy to find what you are looking for quickly.
The only way I think that they could improve on it would be to allow for multi-word searches like “lifehacker firefox”, which would let you view all pages on lifehacker about firefox (that you had been to before).
Firefox 3 is still in beta, and it shows (still some rough edges to work out), but if you want to tinker with it, I highly recommend it. Use the PortableApps version in order to isolate it from your regular Firefox profile and settings.
If you want to try it with your extensions, you can use this trick to get at least some of them working with it.
Comments 1
Actually, the multi-word search is supposed to be in beta 4. I’ve been trying to figure out what else they could put in, and I’m drawing blanks.
Posted 13 Feb 2008 at 12:22 am ¶Post a Comment