Firefox 3

I’ve been running Firefox 3 Beta 3 for a little while on my macbook, and so far I’ve found it to be quite good. It’s faster than firefox2 and I’m surprised by how quickly I warmed up to the new look (it looks more like a native mac app now).

The most noticeable change is the location bar, which lets you search the URLs and titles of your history (instead of just searching the beginning of the URLs as it does in firefox 2. Here’s what it looks like:

Some people don’t like it, but I think it just needs some more work. I like that it learns over time which results should be on the top for a given input (or you can star items to promote them). The UI is way too busy, though. There’s no easy route for the eye to follow (I’d love to see an eye-tracking study on this). I don’t find the bold/underlined keywords to be helpful at all, it just makes things busier.

It’s a beta, still, so there’s time to improve it, but otherwise I’m sure there will be a lot of extensions that tweak it.