firefox

Firefox 3.0 web-browser has been released! The new browser has much slicker (imho) user-interface, feels faster/lighter and is just plain awesome!

For FireBug users (i.e. any web-developer and designer?) out there: you need to manually download a new major release version, 1.2.0b4. Automated update of 1.05 won't work.

Don't know about Windows machines, but on Macs you can rename the existing Firefox to Firefox2 under Applications, before installing Firefox3 and that way you can keep running both in parallel (though not at the same time). Once you upgrade the plug-ins, you can not use them in the Firefox 2, anymore and you will start getting warnings. It's still useful for testing rendering of websites and making sure your HTML/CSS works in Firefox 2, though.

There are tons of wonderful Firefox add-ons. In fact, that is what makes this browser stand out among other browsers. However, be cautious to install every other extension you think may be cool. Firefox performance can significantly degrade when you install many/random extensions.

Anyway, for what it's worth, following is the list of Firefox extensions that I can not live without (alphabetically):

• Aardvark
• Add N Edit Cookies
• CookieSwap
• del.icio.us
• Extended Statusbar
• Fire Encrypter
• Fire Bug ( I bless the day Joe Hewitt started programming!)
• MeasureIt
• Server Spy
• Talkback (well, i can live without it but keep it installed as courtesy to Firefox)
• User Agent Switcher

P.S. I am not trying to be lazy or annoying when not linking these plugins. First, such links may soon get invalidated because URLs change all the time, second - if you google "firefox plugin <addon name>" you will find any of them, easily - promise!

If you noticed that your Firefox installation takes significant time to connect to websites, there may be an easy solution. It will take you 30 seconds and save you a lot of time/annoyance in the future.

So:

• Type "about:config" in the address field and have Firefox open it as if it was an Internet URL. Firefox configuration page will appear.
• In the "Filter" text field, type: "dns" to get dns-related configurations only.
• Note the configuration named "network.dns.disableIPv6". It's value should be "true" (IPv6 should be disabled). If not, click on the value field to make it true.

Restart Firefox and enjoy faster connection times.