Tabbed browsing, introduced in Mozilla’s original Firefox in 2004, has changed the surfing habits of a generation of users and the “Awesome Bar”, a feature in Firefox 3, could do the same.
Mozilla signalled it was close to a June launch for Version 3.0 on Monday, with the posting of Release Candidate 1, and Mike Schroepfer, head of engineering, and Mike Beltzner, director of user experience, gave us a demo of all the new features last week.
The “Awesome Bar”, as its nickname suggests, has attracted the most approval from beta testers. It’s the same location bar where you type in the url of a website, but Mozilla has empowered it to also act as a search bar for your web history.
Typing in “open”, for example, could drop down a box listing sites previously visited about open source, based on the word being found in the page title or site address. Sites can also be tagged by users, so ones with “music” tags would come up whenever “music” is typed in the bar.
The thinking is that users’ main interests are reflected in their browsing and bookmark history and this is the fastest way for them to recall where they want to go.
The location bar also has a star icon next to the web addresses now, and one click on it saves the site as a bookmark.
The Download, Password and Add-ons managers have also been improved, pages can now be zoomed in and out and security has been stepped up.
Mozilla claims Firefox’s Gecko 1.9 engine makes the browser two to three times faster than Firefox 2 and renders images and text better.
Mr Schroepfer said Firefox currently has 175m users worldwide and an 18 per cent market share in the browser category still dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
As an open-source venture, Mozilla’s 150 staff worldwide also depend on the code contributions of 500 outside programmers and beta testing of its nightly “builds” by 20,000 people. The company makes money from Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and others paying to be an option in its search box. Last October, it reported around $66m in revenues for 2006, up 25 per cent on the previous year.
Other Mozilla projects include Prism – the ability to make sites such as Google Mail behave like desktop applications, launched with their own icons – and Fennec, a web browser for mobile phones that uses the same engine as Firefox 3.
