Firefox 3

Once upon a time, I used Firefox. I've since switched to Safari upon getting a Mac, but I still have a great amount of respect for the fiery bastard. It's a shame that there were so many technical difficulties around the release of Firefox 3, it would've been great to see it make the record books. And who knows, maybe it still did. Firefox has updated security features, added on more add-ons, and in general updated everything for this new release. I'm only reviewing Firefox 3 for Mac OS X, so this doesn't necessarily apply to the Windows version.

To start off, Firefox 3 for Mac is Cocao based, so it acts and looks like a native Apple app, even down the the default Apple font. Scrolling with the MacBook trackpad is jumpy and unsatisfying. I know there's the option of smooth-scrolling, but it's laggy and equally bad. I hate to compare it to Safari, but that's what Firefox is attempting, so I have to mention that Safari's scrolling is unbelievably smoother than that of Firefox. The interface is a bit chunky and big, taking up more of the screen than I'd like. I prefer Safari's minimalist appearance. Upon clicking a website's favicon, Firefox 3 displays said website's extended information, whereas in Safari, that action highlights the current address. But then again, you can click anywhere in the address bar in Firefox for the same effect. One thing I really like about Firefox 3 is the Smart Location bar, which analyzes how many times you go to any given website and displays the pages ranked by number of visits according to what you begin to type. Firefox also seems to load images faster than Safari, and, at certain times, whole pages. Also included is a cool preference where you can dictate what app a certain filetype opens with. One thing i was disappointed with was the fact that Firefox 3 looks exactly like Firefox 3 beta. Overall, I guess I'm a more simple browser of the internet, and I don't necessarily mind typing a quick 'wiki' after a google search topic, instead of choosing the Wikipedia search engine built in to Firefox 3, but I can definitely see how this monster of an update will spread like they intended it to.

5/7