Today Mozilla Firefox 3 has finally been released.  This release, which has been in beta and RC for months, marks a great leap in the usability of Firefox.  These improvements include better support for the look of native widgets, the new AwesomeBar which integrates with the bookmarks and history, better JavaScript performance and lower and more maintained memory usage.  Also, under the hood changes now allow Firefox 3 to pass the infamous Acid2 test and history and bookmarks are now stored using SQLite.

Places / Library

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This one feature makes the AwsomeBar and the new Library interface work nicely.  All the history and bookmarks are stored in a SQLite database.  By doing so, it is possible to quickly access, organize, and search history and bookmarks.  This single improve makes replication of profiles much easier for backup and maybe someday synchronization.

AwesomeBar

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This is one of the improvement that most people will likely first notice.  The AwesomeBar puts both history and bookmarks right at your finger-tips.  As you enter a URL in, it will list not only most visited URL from the history, but also bookmarks that could match that URL.

Another great feature of the awesome bar is the new bookmark star.  When you visit a site, this star appears on the end of the bar and gives you a one click way to bookmark a site you just found and want to remember.  It also lights up when you are visiting a site  you have already bookmarked.  The best part about this new features is that when you first click the star, it does add the bookmark directly to the bookmark menu but to a list of unsorted bookmarks that you can organize later with the Library.  This keeps your bookmark menu uncluttered and makes these sites appear in your AwesomeBar list when you type in the URL to return to the site later.

Security

There are some new security features in Firefox 3.  One of the best in my opinion is Firefox now reads the Windows Vista registry information about the currently installed anti-virus scanner.  It will now scan downloaded files with the installed anti-virus software if told to do so by the Vista Parental Controls.

Firefox 3 also supports real-time certificate revocation and verification thanks to the new OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) and EV-SSL.

Other improvements include; blocking access to sites that are known for distributing malware or run phising scams based on a periodicly updated list from Google; secure connections are now required to update Firefox Add-ons; and plug-ins with known security or stability problems can now be blacklisted by Mozilla.

Speed and Memory Improvements

Even with all the new features, Mozilla Firefox 3 is also the fastest release performing release to date and it uses less memory too.  Major improvements to JavaScript and XPCOM will make websites perform better and allow Firefox to consume less memory. Many redundant components and code have been merged or rewritten make Firefox do less switching between JavaScript and C++ which enquires performance penalties.

In Closing

Mozilla Firefox 3 is by far the best release to date.  It seems that Mozilla is only going forward with no regression in Firefox.  These changes make Firefox a choice web browser for today’s web surfer.