Discussing Firefox 3′s features

February 11th, 2007

After several discussions of Mozilla’s developers, during last week, the features for Firefox 3 were gathered and sorted out.

Gecko, the rendering engine upon which all of the Mozilla applications rely will be tweaked for better standards and support. What worths mentioning is the ability of saving documents as PDFs. Since the PDF should and maybe will remain the main format used in exchanging documents for the upcoming years, all of us will be monitoring the development progress for this feature.

Another important feature would be the enhancing of the navigation while going back to a form using the POST function. That annoying warning message won’t be visible anymore.

The guys at Mozilla are implementing a possibility for us to use a theme or a plugin without restarting Firefox. They might even implement a plugin manager, so things can get easier as it goes.

Since security is one of the most discussed topics related to browsers, Firefox 3 will have a EV certificate support, even if limited to accepting and/or displaying them. EV certificates are more reliable and have an extended validation.

On the other hand, Mozilla is planning to get rid of the browser crashes caused by not responsive plugins (I often get that when trying to display a PDF document within the browser window), but unfortunately that got scheduled for the Firefox 4. The feature would require major code re-writing, and that would delay Firefox 3′s release date.

Last but not least, they considered implementing a crash reporting tool called “Airbag” meant to replace Talkback, and they are going to release the MSI version of the installer as well for the whole package.

We’re looking forward to try the final version of what’s supposed to be the best browser out there.