After upgrading to Ubuntu8 Hardy, I have been using the new beta release of Firefox, which ships automatically with the OS upgrade. It has a whole bunch of new features, some of which are very useful, and I thought I’d give my thoughts here.
The documentation says that there is a new rendering engine, which frankly I am not technical enough to understand properly, but in terms of user experience, the site also claims that Firefox now has
Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.
Which has been extremely useful. due to ongoing driver/resolution/graphics issues, the web has been a pain to use at times on this PC. But with the scalable full page zoom, it almost doesn’t matter any more. It works far better than in Opera or IE as I remember it. With the new zoom feature, text no longer runs way outside of what the designer obviously intended, and images are now viewable. I can now see who that person in the thumbnail picture on facebook is. And the fact that I no longer have to increase the size immediately on entering a site/tab because it is stored for me, improves use considerably.
The next very sensible change is the
Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
It always bothered me that when I logged in to a site where I was unsure exactly what password I had used, that Firefox would only ask me if I wanted to remember it before I knew that I’d gotten the password right. It also now drops down at the top of the page rather than as a dialog, which makes it far easier to ignore - if you don’t want to remember the password, you don’t have to click anything, and it doesn’t force itself upon your browsing experience. Which is far, far better.
Possibly the most interesting change (to me) as something that they’ve improved without my ever having noticed it was broken is
Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for. Results are returned according to their frecency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that you’re seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!
This works very well. Adaptive algorithms that tune to my habits? Generally something to be sceptical about. But this one actually does seem to work. Firstly the dropdown from the address bar is larger, each entry is about 2.5 times the size what it was, features a favicon if it can retrieve one, and lets you see far easier. Secondly, it works on parts of urls, not just scans from the beginning. You can type the name of the .html file, or a part of the directory, or partial words that are included in the address. And it actually does seem to bring up the most recent and most regular in the list for pretty much everything I’ve wanted to autocomplete. This is probably the one feature that I would really miss should I change browser. (Apart from the page zoom, which is useful to me but only because it fixes issues that firefox shouldn’t really have to.)
Only two other things that have been useful to me, but not so I’d shout about them, but they are the ability to Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit. Which I can see being useful for some people, although I’ve just disabled it, and also the Text selection improvements: multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; double-click drag selects in “word-by-word” mode; triple-clicking selects a paragraph. Although I’ve not used it much more than to check that it works, I can remember wanting to do this and being irritated in times past. Good to know that you could.
On the other hand…
It is a beta release. It crashes. Quite a lot. It has all kinds of problems with Google services that you have to log in to. More specifically, logging out of them. Leaving Gmail crashes it consistently as in pretty much 95% of occasions I log out. Google Reader on occasion (without any particular rhyme or reason as far as I can see, I have read somewhere that it’s more to do with processes running elsewhere that causes this to happen rather than an internal Firefox problem per se, but I haven’t a clue what it is that I’m running that does so.) Analytics and Webmaster Tools have been almost always fine, Facebook crashes on logout every now & then, but Gmail is the real killer.
So….
All said, I completely understand why they decided to ship it as the default browser for Hardy. The improvements are genuine improvements, and have made the browser better. Having to use Opera to access Gmail is a pain. (More so for me probably because of above issues about this PC) If they fix this in the final release, which I’m sure they will, it looks like a very good one. It’s enough of a better browser that I haven’t uninstalled it to revert back, or installed the previous version to run alongside it.
