Upgrade to Firefox 3.0 means more speed!

I'm feeling very speedy this morning! I've just upgraded to Firefox 3.0 - and have experienced the same increase in speed as I did many moons ago when I first uploaded Firefox and switched from using IE for everything - except access to Microsoft updates (because Bill won't 'play ball'!)

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 had become a bit of a RAM hog and lost some of the speed which made Mozilla Firefox 1.0 so attractive. The decrease in requirement for RAM means that other programs now run faster too. Installation was also fast.

Allium series: Beginning
7" x 5", coloured pencils on Mat Board
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Key installation date is as follows:

• It operates on Windows 2000; Windows XP; Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista
• Minimum Hardware: Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater); 64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater) AND 52 MB hard drive space

Features I've noticed so far are:

Upgraded

• it looks a bit different - but not much (it's rather like Vista)
  
• all my browser tabs and bookmarks updated automatically
  
• add-ons indicate whether they have been updated for Firefox 3.0 or not eg del.icio.us has not yet updated its Firefox add-on which I use a lot (There's no real excuse for this - the beta has been around for ages!)
  
• it's much faster
  
• There's a number of resulting bugs in Blogger which have been noted by Bugzilla. For example, I appear to have lost the ability to use the tab key to indent further the bullet points in Blogger. Which is going to be a major pain until its sorted!

New

• a new 'most visited' tab has appeared on the extreme left of the tabs. I think this learns as you visit sites - as I just clicked it and it brought up every web page I've visited since installation.
• you can now check who owns a site and the security status of a site by clicking on its favicon
• you can associate keywords with bookmarks in order to group them by topic. I haven't yet tried this other than to rightclick on my blog tab and saving that with a keyword in the slot below the bookmark folders option. I'll update if I run into problems
• Lots of other stuff - see the link below.
  

I've not yet found my way around it all - but will becoming back to this page on the Mozilla website to read more later.

• All the relevant links are in Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Release Notes - which includes What's new in Firefox 3.0; Known issues and FAQs (which may well come out as the GB version).
• You can customise....
• ...and here's the tips and tricks

Why change or upgrade?

Firefox tends to be favoured by the IT geek crowd and the security conscious. For anybody concerned about security take alook at the security page and in particular the graphic item on the right hand side which links to this article in the Washington Post Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006.

Firefox is increasing its overall share of browsers in use - it's now up to a third and IE share is decreasing all the time.

Last Tuesday Firefox 3.0 set a world record for the most downloads on one day. Are you going to be following the 14 million people who have downloaded it since it was published last Tuesday?

Note: The drawing is another in my Allium Lifecycle series - see Prelude - I'm also working on others.