As we mentioned in a previous post Firefox 3 was released just a few hours ago. With more than 15000 improvements, this release is a landmark in internet browsing.
Built on the Gecko 1.9 web rendering platform, which has been in development for the past 34 months, this new version promises improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.
Among the new / improved features we mention :
- Malware Protection who warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware.
- New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown.
- Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.
- Vista Parental Controls
- New Download Manage
- Resumable downloading
- Smart Location Bar: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for. Results are returned according to their a combination of frequency, and recency of visits to that page, ensuring that you’re seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!
- New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
- Memory usage optimizations
- Many speed improvements
- One click bookmarking
- Full Zoom
- Many updates and new features for web developers (see complete list here).
