Mozzila Firefox 3 Download

Seems every tech blog in the land has picked up on the hot release of the week - Mozzila Firefox 2.0. I heard a lot of good things about it while still in Beta and I finally got round to giving it a spin today.
IE7 also saw a new release this week but got a lot less attention/praise (unless you work for Microsoft) as it didn’t offer much extra compared to RC1 which I already had installed. Opera’s latest release has impressed as it’s the first browser to pass the Acid2 test.
So is FF2.0 worth the download. Well if you haven’t got Mozzila Firefox at all it’s an obvious yes. Once you’ve tried Mozzila Firefox for a couple of weeks you’ll find it a frustrating experience to try and browse the web with anything less. However, I am sure I’m preaching to the converted so I’ll focus on What’s New in 2.0.
Firstly upgrading was a doddle. I was concerned about loosing settings or my favorite extentions but most of my favourite settings and extentions are now built in to Mozzila Firefox as standard. Most of the other custom extentions were updated during the beta so it was a simple matter of running the update for them when prompted asI opened FF2.0 for the first time.

Improved Tabbed Browsing
Tabbed browsing was one the best features Mozzila Firefox had to offer when it came out. Since then it has caught on in a big way. I typically have 10 or more tabs open at a time so this new release has enhanced the tabs further for me. Now each tab has it’s own close button instead of having to view the tab and click close at the end of the tab row (you can of course still middle-click to close but handy for when I’m in an internet café with a no/broken middle button/scroll wheel)
Remember cursing when you accidently closed the wrong tab. Now the new History menu option allows you to restore recently closed tabs. Not only is the tab restored but any text you were filling in forms. A life saver when you close you blog page without saving. This often happened when I had been working with a large number of tabs and couldn’t see enough of the title to see which tab was which. Now Mozzila FF2.0 has a handy button at the end of the tab row (where the close button used to be) which when clicked shows a drop-down list of all the open tabs with their favicon and title.

Improved RSS support
Viewing the xml RSS feed was always difficult to read in fact I never bothered. Just copied the url for whatever purpose I needed the feed for. Now when you view a feed page Mozzila Firefox styles the xml for you so there are legible titles, text, and links. At the top of the page it also gives you the option to create a live bookmark for the page or add the feed to bloglines, google reader or Yahoo. It also gives you the option of other so you can use you favourite reader if not already listed.

Faster Browsing
One thing that will benefit all users regardless of whether they are a power user or not is that Mozzila Firefox 2.0 is less resource hungry and is actually faster. Faster to open, faster to open tabs and even load pages in cases. Despite the improvement you can tweak things further. Mozzila Firefox prefetches pages by following links on a page before you click them. If you click the link the page loads very quickly as it’s already downloaded, however, if you don’t click a link to a page it’s prefetched for you it’s wasted bandwidth and cpu cycles. If you ISP has a bandwidth cap or you want to reduce the load on your cpu then you can disable this feature. You can also cap the amount of ram ff uses. See the about:config section below for more info.
More Customiseable

Mozzila Firefox was already highly customiseable. With the huge selection of themes, settings and extentions already available in FF1.5 no two people seemed to have the same looking and functioning Mozzila Firefox. Version 2.0 takes it further with enough tweakable elements to please even the most fussy. See some examples in the about:config section below.

Session Restore
I loved the session restore extention and now this is built in to 2.0. When you close/crash Mozzila Firefox you don’t lose all the pages you were viewing. Re-open the browser and everything is restored the way you left it, even half completed forms. To turn this feature on choose Tools > Options > under Main tab there is the option - When Mozzila Firefox Starts: - choose Show my Windows and Tabs from the last time.

Intergrated Spell Checker
I believe this was in version 1.5 but I didn’t notice or use it until 2.0. Now you can set it to spell check single line form fields aswell as large text areas.

Better intergration with Search engines
In previous versions of Mozzila Firefox you could add search engines to the top right window of your browser but this has now been improved. Mozzila Firefox now detects if a page has a search facility and gives you the option to add it to your list of search tools. It also adds ajax powered search like Google Suggest. This means as you type it will suggest search terms using a combination of your past search entries (i.e. autocomplete) and using AJAX to search the search engines results/database.

about: config
By typing about:config into your address bar you can view a huge list of tweakable elements within Mozzila Firefox. Rather than me explain away each feature check out some highlights on lifehacker.com
A more detailed item by item describtion can be found on MozillaZine
So what are you waiting for? Get Mozzila Firefox