Product Spotlight: Firefox 3 Video
Product Spotlight: Firefox 3 Video Transcript
>> The browser wars are back, and they are heating up. Firefox came out swinging in 2004, and geeks and security conscious surfers loved it. Now, it's all grown up and it's got Internet Explorer in its sights. Is it time for you to make the twitch? I'm Molly Wood, and I'm shining the product spotlight on Firefox 3. Now, there have always been a lot of things to love about Firefox. It's stable. It's great with tab browsing. It's had fewer security holes then Internet Explorer. But Firefox 2 took forever to load. And it ate up a ton on system resources. It would get slow, and bogged down. And I'm not going to lie; it was a little bit crash prone, not anymore. Firefox 3 is ready for primetime. It's fast, it loads fast, it switches between tabs more quickly. I still noticed a little slow down if I leave a bunch of tabs open overnight. And if you do have a lot of tabs open, Firefox will use more memory then almost any other program, you're running. But if won't get progressively worse like it use to, and that's probably the number one improvement in day-to-day usability. Another major and controversial change is the location bar. Mozilla is calling it the awesome bar, which is cute. I admit it. It knows your bookmarks and your browsing history, and it actually searches as you type. So if I type in T, I'll get tech [inaudible], Twitter, TinyURL, Television without Pity, my own blog, www.themolly.com. And as I type, it'll either narrow or expand my searches. Personally, I haven't found the Awesome bar either annoying or particularly helpful. It definitely saves on typing, which I like. But I can see where it might reveal things you didn't want to share, like the fact that I read So You Think You can Dance recaps. There are ways to turn off the Awesome bar and go back to the old location bar, but they're not that easy. I actually think Mozilla might want to consider a classic view feature in their next release. Other new features include a new way to bookmark sites. You just click this star button here, once to bookmark, or twice to change the name, assign a folder. And now this is new, you can fill in tags for easier bookmark searching. There are also handy history buttons here. Most visited is a sort of running bookmarks list. And one you remember that it's there, it's actually one of the handiest features in the browser. I also like this next trick, even though I don't know how often I'd ever use it. If you click the so call Fav icon here, you'll get all the information about a website, like how many times you visited, whether you've stored passwords. And if you have stored passwords, you can actually click to view them. You can set permissions for the specific site, which is really good; if say you often go to a site that launches a million popups. And this is even better. You can see what RSS feeds are available for the site. This is a very slick feature. Internet Explorer has none of that. Firefox 3 is meant to look more like a native application on your desktop now, which to me just meant that it looked a lot uglier on windows. It got a new download manager that looks like the first dialogue window ever created. But it does have some improved features, like search, and the ability to pause and resume downloads. Handy. And the add-on's manager is way improved. You can now find new add-ons without having to jump to a new webpage. Awesome. In terms of security, Firefox 3 will warn you if you're visiting a phishing [assumed spelling] site, or if a site is trying to download Malware. That's pretty handy, but some researchers reported that it didn't work all the time, which could be a big problem for newbies who might just blindly believe it, and end up installing Malware, anyway. Still, Firefox 3 is considered the best anti-phishing browsing out there, so you're going to take your chances, no matter what you use. Firefox 3 also has a new easier way to save passwords for a site, which is a nice little bar here instead an annoying popup. The biggest problem with Firefox 3 is one that time will fix. Many of the old add-ons and extensions aren't supported yet, and that might keep you from upgrading, if you use a lot of extensions, but they're going to come around pretty quickly, so that makes Firefox 3, let's see a must have upgrade for current users, and eventual certainly for some. And for that huge majority that's still on Internet Explorer, it's time to go out and adopt a fox.
>> This browser is a winner. ^M00:04:07 [ Music ]
Is Firefox 3 ready to take down Internet Explorer? Molly Wood takes a good, hard look at the new browser.
