Posted on 06/12/2008 6:02:12 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
A new version of the Firefox Web browser is scheduled for release Tuesday with improvements in security, speed and design.
Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new "Places" feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven't bookmarked.
There's also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list-similar to what's already available on Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 7 browser.
Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn't disrupt the log-in process.
Firefox also will start blocking rather than simply warning about sites known to engage in "phishing" scams that try to trick users into revealing passwords and other sensitive information. The new version adds protection from sites known to distribute viruses and other malicious software.
The list of suspicious sites come from Google Inc. and StopBadware.org, a project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities.
Security researchers who need access to problem sites can manually turn the feature off.
Firefox 3 also offers speed and design improvements-the back button is now larger than the forward button, for instance, because people tend to return to a previous page more often, said Mike Schroepfer, the project's vice president of engineering.
Firefox is the No. 2 Web browser behind Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer. It comes from Mozilla, an open-source community in which thousands of people, mostly volunteers, collectively develop free products.
Mozilla has been developing Firefox 3 for nearly three years and has been publicly testing it since November for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.
Its supporters are organizing launch parties around the world next week, and Mozilla is trying to set a world record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period.
Microsoft is currently testing Internet Explorer 8, while Opera Software ASA released Opera 9.5 on Thursday.
I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.14 right now. I’ll upgrade to 3.0 RC on Tuesday. I switched to Firefox primarily because Netscape went belly up. The Mozilla family browsers (Firefox and Netscape) were the first to have tabbed browsing. I remember how much fun it was to bounce easily between web sites on election night 2004. I couldn’t do that with the Microsoft browser.
One thing I’ve never been able to figure out is how they make money off this.
That memory leaking has been a problem since around version 0.7.
I used to post on their forum about it, but gave up. They didn’t seem interested in fixing it and tried to blame it on the various extensions.
Some versions aren’t too bad.
I stopped upgrading at 2.0.0.11.
As long as they fix the damn memory leaks. The only problem I ever have with Firefox is when a long session ends up using 400 MB of my memory even with only one tab open.
I love Firefox also. But I downloaded this thing called NoScript that is an addon for Firefox. I was ok with it at first, but now it’s blocking me from accessing my Yahoo mail. I’ve searched and cannot find how to uninstall it. It’s not listed on the Programs on the Control Panel. Anyone have any ideas? I’m considering that since the new version is coming out I’ll just uninstall the version I have now and download the new one. I’m hoping that will fix this irritation I’ve created for myself!
I hope the new version will run better on my machine. Firefox crashes several times a day and all of the fixes mentioned on Mozilla’s site help.
Tools/Add-ons/NoScript/Uninstall
Thank you so much! :~) New knowledge. Always a good thing!
http://webmail.mozdev.org/index.html
I have FireFox-2 with Windows Vista, and to access Options, I click on Tools (near File, Edit and View on the tool bar). I don’t have an ‘S’ icon at the lower right.
I was getting the hang of how it worked but it seemed that no matter what I tried, it kept blocking me from my mail! I OK’d Yahoo.com and it still wouldn’t let me in. Just before I uninstalled the NoScript I found I could access mail under Yahoo! on the Toolbar between Bookmarks and Tools, but not by clicking on Yahoo Mail under the Bookmarks column. Very weird.
Go to the “View” Menu and click on “status bar” so that a check mark appears next to it. You should now have a visible bar at the bottom of the screen, on which the NoScript icon will be located. I use Windows XP, but I’m assuming the behavior would be the same for both operating systems.
I've been using Thunderbird and the free Yahoo e-mail. Is it still the case that YPOP'S is needed?
I have the status bar at the bottom of the screen, but there isn’t any ‘S’ icon or anything else permanently displayed on it. Doesn’t really matter anyway, since I can easily access the Option menu through Tools. Thanks, though.
http://email.about.com/cs/winw2previews/gr/yahoopops.htm
And if it does close, it “restores session” later.
Good news! Although I’ve adopted my Mac’s Mail over Thunderbird, I still haven’t been able to get into using Safar, still preferring Firefox. This will probably seal Safari’s fate for me unless Apple pulls another surprise.
They get most of their money from Google for being the default search in the search bar and having a Google home page.
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