Alex Faaborg, a user experience designer working on FireFox 3, writes about some of the new features and looks with the new client.
Firefox 3 is going to provide 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, along with information about how you can help contribute, by providing feedback on these designs, or creating your own UI mockups.
So far the feature set is looking like this:
1. "Places" Mozilla’s brand name for their online Bookmarking service. which uses tagging ala Del.icio.us.
It will be interesting to see whether user’s start using Firefox over delicious. Most user’s have a Del.ici.ous button on their browser already but this looks a bit more refined than the service that everyone fell in love with two years ago.
2. Malware Detection: Firefox will work seamlessly with the Google back-end that stores information about sites that are known Malware distributors.
3. Task Based UI for Downloaded Manager.
Very cool, will even handle Micro-formats, and give the option memorize decisions, with RSS parsing to detect the type of content in the RSS feeds, will warn users before opening .exe and other dangerous files.
4. Interesting Anti-phishing technology
The actual domain would get bolded in the web address bar, this would dissuade some web novice from clicking on questionable "Banking" links.
5. Private Browsing
The ability to use Firefox to Browser the Internet privately in a session that doesn’t store any data locally about the session and what the user did. This is great for privacy avocets especially if they can put pressure on Microsoft to do the same thing. I’m not sure how useful this would be though, ISP’s store location information for a certain period of time but it would be great if you were using a libraries computer and didn’t want to expose your username for instance. The URL bar would turn black while in a private session possibly.
6. And More…
A few other features that are also on our radar, but don’t currently have any UI mockups yet:
- Offline Web applications
- Improvements to the password manager
- A graphical keyboard-based UI similar to Quicksilver and Enso for searching the Web, bookmarking and tagging pages, navigating recent history, and switching between tabs. Note: this feature isn’t in the Firefox 3 PRD, and it will probably be released as an experimental extension through Mozilla Labs before it gets considered for inclusion into Firefox.
All in all, I’m loving the direction Firefox 3 is heading. No information currently on backwards compatibility of previous plug-ins but I’ll be following these developments closely.
GeekSpeaker 
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