First look: Firefox 3 beta 3 polishes rough edges

Mozilla has announced the official release of the third Firefox 3 beta, which includes many user interface improvements and a handful of new features. Firefox 3 is rapidly approaching completion, and much of the work that remains to be done is primarily in the category of fit and finish. There will likely only be one more beta release after this one before Mozilla begins issuing final release candidates.

The bookmark dialog, which was integrated into the URL bar in beta 1, has been further tweaked to improve usability. The Delete button at the bottom of the dialog has been replaced with a Cancel button. A Remove Bookmark button now appears at the top of the dialog underneath a label which states the that page has been bookmarked.

In nightly builds that have been released since the beta 3 code freeze, the bookmark process has been refined further. When the user bookmarks the page by clicking the star icon in the URL bar, the browser will inform the user that the page has been bookmarked, but will not provide access to any of the other bookmark information unless the user clicks the Edit button. That interstitial message is a bit annoying, but it fortunately won't bother most power users since it doesn't show up when you use the keyboard shortcut to bookmark a page rather than the star.

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This beta release provides a first look at the Windows theming changes that will appear in Firefox 3. New icons and other artwork that are present in the Windows build reflect the ongoing visual refresh effort. The new "keyhole" back button art is one of the most visible changes in the default theme. In previous versions of Firefox, the back and forward buttons in the navigation toolbar had their own distinct drop-down menus which allowed users to move forward or back by more than one step. In beta 3, the menus have been combined into a single drop-down menu that displays the current position in history and allows the user to move either forward or backward. In the default themes for Windows and Mac OS X, this feature is accompanied by custom artwork. The back button is a large circle and the forward button is smaller. The two buttons are combined into a single shape that vaguely resembles a keyhole.

New icons have appeared in both the default Windows and Linux themes and are particularly noticeable in the preference dialogs and in the application menus. In beta 2, the Linux theme gained the ability to automatically adopt icons from the user's default GNOME icon theme. This feature has been extended broadly to more of the user interface in beta 3. Many additional icons have been designed in the Tango style for cases where no default GNOME icons are available. The Firefox 3 Linux theme also completely adopts the look and feel of the user's GTK theme. On a Linux desktop computer, Firefox 3 beta 3 integration is so good that the browser is virtually indistinguishable from a conventional GNOME application.

The Firefox 3 theme for Windows XP

The Firefox 3 theme for Windows Vista

The Firefox 3 theme for Linux

The Firefox 3 options dialog on Windows

The Firefox 3 options dialog on Linux

Mac OS X integration got a big boost as well with 3.0, with full support for native widgets in forms and inclusion of the new Mac OS X theme. These improvements could potentially cause some Camino users to switch to Firefox.

The Firefox 3 theme for Mac OS X

Native widget support in forms

A few significant improvements to tabbed browsing have landed in beta 3, including support for moving tabs between windows. Beta 3 also adds download progress notifications to the browser status bar so that users can see how many downloads they have in progress even when the download manager window is closed. The URL bar autocompletion mechanism is now better too, and uses an improved algorithm that factors in both the frequency with which pages are visited and how recently pages were last visited.

One of the most promising and impressive new features in beta 3 is an integrated add-on installer system that allows users to search for and install add-ons from addons.mozilla.org directly through the add-on manager user interface.

The new add-on finder in Firefox 3

I'm extremely impressed with Firefox 3 beta 3. I've been using the nightly builds for quite some time now, and I'm convinced that Firefox 3 is very close to being ready for widespread adoption. There are still a number of minor issues, but I suspect that they will be resolved very soon. Firefox 3 delivers massive improvements over Firefox 2 in almost every conceivable way, particularly in the areas of performance and memory overhead. Users who want to give beta 3 a try can download it from Mozilla's web site.