• 
• 
• 

 1 of 3

Gallery

New features

Posted on 13 Aug 2008 at 12:01

Firefox 3 produces a small pop-up in the bottom right-hand corner of the browser every time an update to one of your Extensions becomes available. This can prove a touch wearisome, but is intended to improve security. Mozilla can also disable add-ons or other plug-ins that it believes are a security risk.

Choosing the right protocol

Web application protocol handlers are a new addition that could help drive another nail in the desktop apps coffin. You can now prompt Firefox 3 to open a web app instead of the default desktop software for certain tasks.

For example, if a website wanted to invite readers to email the site editor, they would traditionally use an HTML Mailto link which would prompt the default mail client (usually Outlook) to open. But with the increasing popularity of webmail clients, Mozilla has made it possible to open Mailto commands with Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

First, type "about:config" into the location bar and click through the humorous warning. Then check that the "gecko.handlerService .allowRegisterFrom DifferentHost" variable is set to true.

Then enter the following command into the address line:

javascript:window.navigator .registerProtocolHandler ("mailto","http://mail.google .com/mail/?extsrc=mailto &url=%s","Gmail")

Click the grant permission button and you'll now be able to select Gmail and Yahoo from Mailto links. It's not only email that's affected; calendar entries could be handled by 30boxes.com instead of Outlook, for instance. You can see an example of how this might be implemented at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/167firefox1.

Firefox 3 also offers native support for running web apps offline, based on the HTML 5 standard for offline caching. Like Google Gears, this is intended to allow apps such as RSS readers to continue working even without an active net connection. At the time of writing, however, the only app that worked with Firefox 3's offline support was a Mozilla test, with Nitot imploring Google to merge its Gears technology with the HTML 5 offline standard. Whether Google will heed Mozilla's advice is unclear.

Worthy upgrade

Firefox 3 contains a healthy dose of new features that make day-to-day surfing more pleasurable. We found that enhancements such as the Awesome Bar and bookmark-tagging vastly reduce the amount of time you spend plunging through your browser history or trying to dig out poorly filed bookmarks. And it's genuinely quicker too.

Firefox 3 power users guide