Things I love about Firefox 3

I’ve been using Firefox 3 alphas, betas, and RCs off and on for several months now, and I’m looking forward for the final release of Firefox 3. It’s a fantastic release and has really come together in the past several months, and I think anyone who’s ever used Firefox or even thought about using it should download it as soon as it’s released.

Thus, I bring to you a non-comprehensive listing of things I love that are new to Firefox 3, in no particular order.

  • OS X-consistent window chrome theme
  • Aqua form controls and buttons
  • The Awesome Bar (this cannot be overemphasized enough)
  • Overall speed and performance increases
  • Quartz font-rendering on OS X, bringing with it OS consistent font smoothing!

Things that I love in Firefox 3, but where credit deserves to go somewhere else:

  • AdBlock Plus

Things that I wish were in Firefox 3, but sadly aren’t:

  • Text responds to CMD-CTRL-D for the dictionary pop-up (bug 301451)
  • In-browser PDF Reader plugin (no, Adobe’s plugin does not work)

Try a sneak peek of Firefox 3 right now by downloading a release candidate build. As always with pre-releases, the intent is to figure out what significant but unknown bugs are before general release, so if this idea makes you squeamish you should probably avoid it for now.

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