Instant Shift Technology

while the popularity of Firefox is due to a number of elements, including its vast array of add-ons that enable you to perform almost whatever task you can imagine, and its open source development, the predominant reason it grabbed so many people?s attention was its tabbed browsing. Ok, it wasn?t actually the first to market with tabbed browsing – that honour goes to Opera – but many people had been put off by Opera simply because you had to pay for it, even though that was no longer the case.

However, just in the nick of time the Mozilla Foundation has pulled its finger out and released beta versions of Firefox 3, with a view to officially unveiling its latest and greatest in the next few months. So, with beta version 2 now available for Mac and PC, I thought I?d take you on a trip round what in my opinion is going to be the best browser available in the foreseeable future.

I am impressed with this latest beta version of Firefox. It may be late, but I think it was worth the wait. Seems to be faster all around in loading web pages and starting up. I haven?t encountered any bugs yet, either. I actually like the idea of having a close button in each tab. Firefox?s implementation doesn?t really make sense, though. Inactive tabs do not display the close button, unless you hover over where the button should be. In that case, the invisible button suddenly becomes visible. Buttons should not catch you by surprise.

It?s not a huge change from version 1.5. In fact, firefox hasn?t really changed all that much since I first started using it back when it was still called firebird (verison 0.6 or something?). Every new version has added a few little things (like being able to move tabs around, the new spell check, the ?highlight/righ-click/search web for ?blah? option?, etc.) that make my browsing experience a little more enjoyable, but the basic idea is the same.

In just a few years, Firefox has taken the previously dormant browsing market by storm and woken the slumbering giant Microsoft. The Mozilla browser now owns 12-14% of the browser market (the number varies depending on the source – see Wikipedia for more). The Firefox brand is also making an impact, thanks in part to the Spread Firefox campaign. For example, last year Firefox was voted the #7 global brand by brandchannel.com. But the question is still up in the air: will Firefox ever get close to Internet Explorer?s market share?

A recent post about IE7 on TechCrunch generated a lot of comments complaining about the lack of innovation in the Microsoft product. The timeline between IE6 and IE7 has been unusually long by software standards, so it was reasonable to expect a decent amount of innovation. But despite major improvements and work towards standards support, IE7 looks like a Firefox wannabe.

So one would expect that Firefox has a chance to further cut down IE?s lead in the browser market, by introducing further innovation and continuing to improve the browsing user experience. Let?s look and see?

User interface improvements

The first thing that stands out in the new Firefox is the more modern, snappier look and feel. Everything is more shinny, more playful and more clickable. Tabbed browsing was a major browser innovation that Firefox popularized – and in version 2.0 there are further improvements to this. By default, the links now open in a new tab instead of a new window and each tab has its own close button. There is also a new handy way of switching between the tabs, via a pulldown list of all open tabs.

All these improvements are subtle, but good productivity boosters for the user.

Search improvements Search is probably the most fundamental thing we do online and Firefox excels at integrating search engines in a very smart way. With this new release, Firefox adds the search completion mechanism, which works just like Google complete. As soon as the user starts typing, potential search phrases show up.

This feature has been also added to the Firefox search engine format, allowing each search engine to support it. Perhaps the most interesting new thing in Firefox 2.0 is the integration of RSS Readers. Since its early days, Firefox has made a commitment to usability and ease of use, which implies integrating all things web right into the browser. Wiring search engines into the browser is one example. In Firefox 2.0 we now see similar integration done with RSS readers.

Firefox 3 will include some significant changes. It uses version 1.9 of the Gecko rendering engine?which itself hasn?t been released yet and which includes the Cairo graphics layer.There are also a wide range of improvements to performance, stability, and security, and it?s also going to present several new user facing features.

Here is a quick recap of design work that?s been going on in the Mozilla community over the past few weeks for Firefox 3. Places is our new infrastructure for storing bookmarks, history, and other information about Web pages. The current implementation of the Places system is still a work in progress, but the final version will support features like bookmark tagging, full-text indexing, extended metadata search, built-in syncing functionality, and support for exporting bookmarks in a broader number of formats.

these interfaces will allow users to organize bookmarks in the ways that work best for them, ranging from constructing traditional folder hierarchies to quickly searching a Web 2.0-esque tagspace. Places will also enable a lot of really innovative bookmarking, history and annotation extensions.

Similar to how Firefox 2 blocks Web sites that are potentially going to try to steal your personal information, Firefox 3 will block Web sites that we believe are going to try to install malicious programs on your computer. Mozilla is coordinating with Google on this feature.

Firefox currently has different dialog boxes for dealing with content depending on if it has a MIME type, is a protocol, is being delivered through RSS, or is an application being downloaded. In addition to unifying our internal architecture for content handling we are also working on a unified content handling user interface. The user will have a consistent UI for selecting the actions they would like associated with content, regardless of if the content is a file being download or is a microformat embedded in a Web page.

The Firefox Browser is a hot topic among computer professionals because they know that this browser has many features than his counterpart, Internet Explorer from Microsoft, don’t have. Microsoft has been very busy updating his software recently, although they haven’t touched it for 6 years after they wiped out Netscape from the market in 2,001, but Microsoft normally acts this way, they only fix their software when things go wrong.
First of all, Firefox is a better-designed browser. No hurry to get more market share, as in case of Microsoft, makes people design systems better. The better is designed a system, the easier it is to update and to maintain, because the subsystems work between each other in a coordinated way.
Next comes the better navigational system. Firefox was the first to include tabbed browsing to allow multiple websites in the same window. If you try to do this with Internet Explorer 6.0, you will end up with so many windows opened that it could crash your computer.
You can update the functionality of the software. Instead of creating bloated software with an enormous list of features, the Mozilla Foundation created a solid piece of software that could be expanded every time users wish, using a component called “plugins”. There are many plugins that you can add to Firefox to make it friendlier.
One important feature is the printing facility. Internet Explorer does not behave well while printing documents, but Firefox could adjust the size of the document to fit the page you are using.
The standards are also respected in Firefox. Maybe you don’t mind about this, but a browser that respect web standards, help developers create web pages that look the same in other browsers and other devices. Microsoft added non-standard features on purpose so when developers started using them, these web sites looked very ugly in all other browsers. This is the main reason why many people thought that Internet Explorer was the best browser for a long time.
The most important thing about Firefox is that it was designed with security in mind. Firefox alerts about “phising” web sites. Those are web sites that look like the real thing, but are owned by other people which are able to read all what you type in there, including your login name, password, your personal data and all you write in the fake site. Last year, Phising sites defrauded more than 2 million people, converting this kind of risk in the most important in the line of “identity theft”. Fortunately, Firefox helps you identify this kind of web pages, blocking access to those sites.
Although Firefox is a terrific tool to help you stop many threats from the Internet, it is very helpful that you know which are the many possible threats in order to reduce the probability to be the target of cyber-criminals that want to dry up your bank account in a blink of an eye.

In Firefox 2, Mozilla adopts an important security feature that Microsoft first added to IE 7, a phishing filter called Phishing Protection that helps protect against malicious Web sites that masquerade as banks, e-tailers, and other sites that might store financial data. Unlike with IE 7, Firefoxâ??s phishing filter is enabled by default, which is of course a good idea. Thereâ??s just one problem: The Firefox Phishing Protection feature isnâ??t very sophisticated. It uses a blacklist of known dangerous sites, which isnâ??t an effective protection against modern electronic attacks that rely on social engineering as well as technical vulnerabilities in the underlying products youâ??re using online. What you need is something that can adapt to threats and update itself automatically.

Alternatively, Firefox lets you enable Googleâ??s phishing filter, which is more effective because it is updated regularly and provides more advanced functionality. On the minus side, the terms of service for Googleâ??s phishing filter literally explain that Google will violate your privacy if you use this product: â??Google will log your action and the URL of the page [you visit],â? the agreement reads. â??It is possible that a URL sent to Google may itself contain personal informationâ? (Figure). Hey, we all trust Google, right? And can you imagine the uproar that would occur if Microsoft did something even remotely this anti-privacy? Meanwhileâ??s Googleâ??s phishing filter hasnâ??t caused any concern. Unbelievable.

In previous versions of Firefox, I used Netcraftâ??s toolbar to help protect against phishing attacks. And while I appreciate that Firefox now offers two integrated anti-phishing solutions, neither is particularly good and neither is as good as what Microsoft offers in IE 7. Thatâ??s a shame.

Incidentally, Mozilla initially responded to news that their solution was ineffective by publishing a paper on its Web site that seeks to prove that Firefox Phishing Protection is, in fact, more effective than IE 7â??s Phishing Filter. However, a third party studyâ??commissioned by Microsoftâ??had already reported this not to be true. So whoâ??s right? Hereâ??s what I know to be true: Blacklists are not effective and Google admits it probably will collect your personal information. Neither of those seems very good to me.

Now, since publishing this review, Mozilla has contacted me and told me that their blacklist is updated â??regularly,â? which is quite a bit more frequently than I previously understood. With phishing attacks, you need protection that is regularly updated, so this is at least acceptable.

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