The Firefox 3 Beta: My Thoughts™

So after seeing a snazzy screenshot from a friend of mine in which his Firefox looked much cooler than my own, I gave in to curiosity and downloaded the beta version of Firefox 3. I've only been using it for the last 20 minutes, and already I'm impressed.

The spangly new bits that immediately got my attention were:

* Noticably faster than Firefox 2, and my macbook got down on its knees and thanked Mozilla profusely for making their 3rd version much friendlier on memory usage.
* A cool little star button at the end of the url bar lets you instantly add a page to your bookmarks. Click it once to add it to generic bookmark list, click it again and you can choose exactly where it goes and all the rest of the guff.
* At the start of the url bar where the site's little icon is found, clicking on that gives you information about the site like whether it's verified or encrypted. This means little to me to be honest, but it's fun knowing these things anyway, so I can look across the room and casually say 'yeah... this page isn't verified. And don't get me started on the encrytption.'
* The Smart Bookmarks folder, which contains recently visited, most visited and recent tags.
* Plus I like the new look:

I think it's generally sleeker and more sophisticated looking than version 2, without overloading the browser frame with too many distractions and gimcrackery.

So all in all, quite pleased with Firefox 3. Well done, nerds!