The latest release of the best browser ever has just come. The Mozilla crew have done a top job with this version of their Firefox web browser and there are many features that make you all warm and gooey inside. If you need some convincing, carry on reading, otherwise get out of here and go download Firefox 3! You have less than 24 hours to download it to be part of the World Record that Mozilla are trying to achieve, most downloads in 24 hours. Here goes a few reasons why the new Firefox Rocks.

Places - They have completely revamped the bookmarks and it is really fast due to the fact it is stored in a database. History and Bookmarks are accessible from here and are easy to manage in folders and even tags. They have also separated the bookmarks into Bookmarks Menu, Toolbar and Unsorted. I really like how they have done this.

Smart Bar -The address bar isn’t just a standard address bar anymore. It is a lot more powerful. You can type in terms and it will show you where they are, whether its at the start of an address URL or page title, or in the middle or end, wherever the term is, it will find it. It it very good and getting the page you want up there so its very easy to access past pages and sites you have been to with the smart bar.

User Interface -Now, no matter what Operating System you use, Firefox 3 looks unique in all 4. They have made Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X and Linux all have different themes that make it match the system better. The browser looks more integrated visually with the operating system than looking like something thrown on top of it. It may not be a huge thing feature wise, and may not make the browser work any better, but the refreshed looks is still a big deal.

There are lots of other great features but those are 3 of the most noticeable and wonderful ones. If you are a current Firefox user, its a no brainer to upgrade to 3. Memory management is hugely improved for starters and the whole browser generally is faster and is more solid. Firefox 3 is the future so upgrade as soon as possible, upgrade now!

The new version of Opera came out a couple of days ago. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try and alternative browser that wasn’t Internet Explorer or Firefox. When I saw the news on the Digg front page, one feature really stood out. This was Opera Link. I wanted to see how well it performs and if it, along with other features was enough for me to take Opera as seriously as I do Firefox. Could this play around make me a switcher?

There were a few surprising things I loved about Opera right off the bat. The first one being a feature called Speed Dial. This is a page displayed when you open a new tab, and it gives you access to your 9 favourite websites. You can choose what websites you put there and it had a thumbnail of the site along with the title underneath for quick access to the sites you access the most.

Another great feature of Opera is the tab preview. When you hover your mouse over a tab on the tab bar for a few seconds, a little thumbnail will display of the current page, and when you scroll your cursor over the other tabs, the thumbnail will change to the website tab hovered. This may sound a little useless but when you have quite a few tabs open, its a great way to find the webpage you are looking for in your tab bar.

On the topic of tabs, I also love the way Opera handles the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut for switching tabs. Unlike in other browsers where it would switch you over to the next tab, Opera shows a little menu with all you current tabs and you can keep tabbing through them till you get to the one desired and that page will come up. It is much cleaner than having to focus half a dozen tabs to get to the one you desire. Also if you go into the options, you can incorporate tab thumbnails, so along with the titles in the menu, you also get a visual aide.

The final feature that really appealed to me was Opera Links. This is a service provided by Opera that synchronizes your browser bookmarks, speed dial and the personal bar (known as the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox.) All the information goes to the cloud and can be synchronized across browsers. And as an added bonus, you can also access your bookmarks and speed dial right from the Opera Links website. This is useful if you are using an alternative browser or a mobile browser and allows you to view all your bookmarked sites right from in the browser.

Now, my Opera experience did come with a few annoyances. One thing I did find odd is the search on the speed dial. I don’t think it is necessary to have that there due to there being a Google search tool on the address bar. I believe that it would be much more useful as a bookmarks and history search, instead of another web search. And while we are on Bookmarks, I didn’t find the bookmarks manager anywhere near as powerful as Firefox’s Places. I am so use to having my Bookmarks Toolbar, Bookmark Menu and General Bookmarks all separate, but still together in a unified place. With Opera, the Personal Bar was completely separate from the other general bookmarks, which is the same as the bookmarks menu. This is not Opera’s fault this annoyed me, I’m just so use to the new way Firefox manages bookmarks that I find the old way frustrating.

The default Opera UI is a bit of a mess compared to other browsers. I don’t understand why everyone wants to change things! Internet Explorer removed/hid the File menu, and Opera thinks that they would prefer to have the Address bar and Tab bar switched around. This is a little annoyance and should not be a problem one you get use to and familiar with it.

Being so use to the Firefox way of browsing, the pop-up password notification box is here, and annoying! Its not too bad because the website still logs on in the background and you can wait for it to successfully log in before saving your password, but I would still prefer it out of the way completely. And while we are at password saving, the Wand password manager is a little different from others. When you go to a site with a saved password, other browsers would auto-complete the username and password fields. Opera on the other hand highlights the edges. I have no idea what this means and ended up typing my username and password again. It wasn’t till a few sites later I noticed a wand icon in the address bar and clicked it and the fields filled in with my login details. It would have been nice to have a notification bubble telling me how to use it the first time this happens just so a new user like myself is aware.

My last minor gripe with Opera is Google. Yes, Google. I use a lot of Google’s services and it was a little annoying to not have them work as well as they do in Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Gmail was stripped down and didn’t have a lot of the cool display that it does in Firefox. It seemed a little stripped down. Also I couldn’t be invisible on GTalk inside Gmail and I couldn’t use any of the Gmail Lab features. I also got an error message on Google Notepad. I could still use it perfectly fine and it looks normal to me, but there was an error message there for some reason. That was just odd. My iGoogle page has quite a few gadgets and one of the gadgets didn’t like Opera, so it caused it to keep refreshing the page. This made iGoogle unusable. I am also disappointed that there is no Google Gears for Opera either. I understand that this is not really Opera’s fault, it’s Google’s, but nevertheless, I still found it to be worthwhile to mention.

In conclusion, I feel that Opera is a great browser, and with a few tweaks and a bit of getting use to, Opera could be a perfect browser. Its memory and CPU usage was as good, if not better than Firefox 3 RC1’s, and it was very stable. Did playing around with Opera 9.5 make me want to switch. No, I’m still a Firefox user and will continue to do so for a while now. But in saying that, I am going to keep Opera around. It is an amazing alternative browser, second best, and I will use it when I need to use another browser for certain tasks.

I had been using Minefield since Alpha 8 which was quite a long time ago. My Firefox profile has been used by Firefox 2 since I last reinstalled Windows on my computer and it had bee used by multiple Alpha and Beta builds (lots of nightlies) and during all the updates, my profile had become a mess and full of information from various versions of Firefox/Minefield. When Firefox 3 RC1 came out, I decided that it was time to start my profile again, except I will save my load of bookmarks I have collected over the years.

The process of backing up my Bookmarks was really simple. Using the new Places manager, exporting the database was simple. I needed a way of getting the saved passwords so I had them on record incase I didn’t know a password and didn’t want to get that information emailed to me. I managed to find a cunning way of backing up and accessing them if needed. After that, I went into the application data folder and renamed my profile. I didn’t delete it straight away in case something when horribly wrong and I wanted to turn back.

This is where the first problem arose. I couldn’t open Firefox because it kept telling me it was still open and in use. It clearly wasn’t due to it not showing in the process manager. I renamed the profile back to its original name and Firefox opened fine. I renamed it back and again Firefox had trouble. What I needed to do was open Firefox with the profile manager so I could create a new profile from scratch. Peppery found it and told me over IM how to do it. It was relatively simple.

With a new profile, I felt lost. This wasn’t my browser! My browser has extensions and acts differently to this. I first went and downloaded a couple of extensions that I needed. After all that, I then went and changed some of the setting in the add-ons and in the program options. Now all I needed was my bookmarks, and my tabs. Restoring my bookmarks was just as simple and fast as exporting them. In a click or two, my bookmarks were all back, and from there, I could restore all my tabs.

Logging into all my sites was going to be a challenge. Because all my passwords were gone, I had to rely on my memory, and my cheat sheet, to assist me with logging on to websites and saving the passwords so I no longer have to remember, not that I have to remember, all my passwords. From this, I am reminded about one of the best features of Firefox 3, the simple password remember bar. It is a godsend compared to the old save password dialog box.

The only real problem I had with this is the address bar. In my old profile, I had 90 days of history and that really made the new address bar work great. It still works good with only bookmarks, but the thing that makes it a wonder, is the addition of history. The feature is definitely not as rich without it, and having no history made it quite useless. Although after a few weeks, it started to become useful again.

I do believe that a clean out was good, and I noticed a significant amount of speed improvements, but that was more likely due to it not having 90 days of history holding it back, and many unused extensions disabled. Even though I did lose history which was slightly annoying, I am very happy I did it and would consider doing it with the released of Firefox 4. I really love Firefox 3 and a clean out did wonders!

A week or so ago, a new bunch of icons were included in one of the nightly Minefield builds. These are more than likely going to be the same, or very similar to the buttons that will be part of Firefox 3.0. They have changed a little, and the first thing you will notice is that they are shiny. The back and forward buttons are closer together and take up less room on the Navigation Toolbar, the drop down arrow buttons have merged into one and feature both previous pages and pages you have went back from, and the refresh button and the cross on the stop button have lost a bit of weight.

The home button has been moved off the Navigation Toolbar and has moved down below to the Bookmarks Toolbar. It also features a shiny new icon. I think it is nice that they have relocated that button because personally, I never use that button. All my homepage tabs open up on startup and I don’t end up closing them, or my last session loads up. Having it down there shows that it is a secondary function and is less important that the forward, back, refresh and stop buttons.

These new spunky icons should be included in Firefox 3 Beta 3 which will be released sometime in the next fortnight.

As some of you already know, I have been using Firefox 3.0 Beta, codenamed Minefield, for a few months now. I do think it is the best update so far and will be a must have for anyone, although Firefox should be no matter what version. Something I stumbled across today was a security feature that was implemented into Firefox, and that is blocking suspicious sites.

Today when I was doing the usual browsing of hundreds of different sites, I came across a site that was blocked by Firefox. I was greeted with a big red alert with a dark grey background, a page similar to the one when the server cannot be found. The page read the following, “The web site at <URL Removed> has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.” I was very intrigued and happy that I witnessed this and love Firefox for blocking bad sites. I wouldn’t have ever thought I would come across this screen when I heard about this feature, but I did.

I do think this is a great feature to have, and hope that they get all those bad sites on the list. This may not be a big feature for me because it is extremely rare I come across sites of the nature but for a lot of people I know, this feature would be a godsend, and also to me too because I won’t be required to fix their infected computer. This function alone is enough to switch your less computer illiterate friends and family to Firefox. Thumbs up to Mozilla for putting this much needed security feature into their browser.

For the past few months, since a little while after I got my new computer, I set up Remote Desktop on my old desktop computer so I could log in and use it from inside my laptop. This is a tool that I have seen, but never really knew how to use, or wanted to use. But now that I have a portable computer, it is nice to control the desktop from anywhere in the house. This little gem that is built into Windows is a fantastic tool.

It was a little time consuming to get it set up because the desktop only had one user account. This made me have to create my own user account, with a password, so I could log in and control the computer remotely. I also had to use a piece of software to hide the user so the computer stays logging into the main account when the computer is turned on. After that, the software is great.

Probably the two reason I use this the most, is to administrate the desktop and do necessary maintenance, start uTorrent and downloads, and to test software. I used the computer to test Firefox 3.0 Alpha 7, also known as Minefield. Because the computer wasn’t my main system with all my important stuff on it, I felt it was the perfect environment to take the plunge with playing around with Alpha software. More recently, I also tested Windows Live Messenger 9.0 Beta and had a play around with it. I now use both of these applications on my main computer because I have felt they are stable enough to use and they do run very well, but I wanted to check them out a little bit before taking the plunge with them on my main system.

It is really nice to be able to use these little gems hidden in your system. There are a lot of things included with Windows that I don’t use, or don’t even know about. Remote Desktop is one of those and it is a great application that is bundled with Windows. I wish I could use it more and for other things and connecting to other computer, but unfortunately I cannot. I wonder what I will discover next, hidden in my computer.

As you all know, I have been using Minefield, also known as Firefox 3.0 Alpha/Beta. This has become my primary browser and I have had to live with the bugs and the lack of extensions. I know there is a way, and an extension, tomake incompatable extensions compatible and I have used them. The only problem is, with all the under the hood changes that are happening, some of the extensions don’t work properly, others that work but cause problems and even some which don’t work fullstop.

I eventually came to the point where I have disabled every extension, that is except one that I really need for productivity reasons. That extension is FaviconizeTab. I open a lot of tabs up. At start up, I have 20 tabs, which then expands as I open and close other tabs but I always have those 20 main tabs open. Without FaviconizeTab, my tab bar would be completely full and I would have to scroll to switch from tab to tab. With this extension, it gives me a lot more room on my tab bar. To be honest, the favicon is enough for me to identify most of my tabs anyway. I do not need the full name because I already know it. Also for the sites and pages with no favicon, I get use to their position on the tab bar that I can remember its location.

All the other extensions I use, well use to use, are just handy things to make things easier and give me extra functionality. They are more luxuries than necessities. Like FoxyTunes. I love that extension. It allows me to control and see what iTunes is doing and give me a lot of functionality in the browser so I don’t have to leave it. My remote is right there in my browser. Greasemonkey is another nice extension that uses scripts it improve or add functionality to specific webpages. Its nice to have because it makes things easier. IE Tab is another extension that allows me to use sites designed specifically for IE inside of Firefox so I don’t have to have two separate browsers open. Again, its nice to have but having them both open can be lived with.And the extension I miss the most, Tab Mix Plus. This adds heaps of extra functionality to tabs in Firefox. It does a lot for me and really helps me managing all the tabs I have open at a time.

Another this I have gone without is Ad Block Plus. This is an extension a lot of people would use. Why? Because they don’t like advertisements. I don’t really like they either but since I have had to live without an ad blocker, the ads don’t really bug me anymore. The good sites have them positioned in a non intrusive place anywhay where it doesn’t affect the user ability to browse the website efficiently. I’m starting to think that I can live on the internet with ads. Some of the ads even attract my attention because they are on things that are interesting. I click ads on some sites, because they interest me and also because I know that it is helping out the site a little bit. If I love the site, I should support it by checking out their sponsors and this isn’t possible if my browser is set to block them out. I don’t think that I will totally remove ad blocking software but I will have one that blocks only certain sites, ones with ads that are annoying andruin the experience on the site.

All of these extensions aren’t really necessary. You don’t have to have them. You can live without them, as I have seen with using test versions of Firefox where the extensions aren’t compatible. When you are limited to what you can have, the challenge can really show you what you can do without. For me, it is going to cut down the number of extensions I use when Firefox 3.0 is officially released. I remember when I was using Firefox 1.5 and I had 20 plus extensions. I cannot believe I had so many. How could I live with that. Its like a house full of clutter. I don’t know how my computer survived, it must have used a hell of a lot of memory. In Firefox 2.0, that dropped down to around 10 extensions and I can see it drop even further in 3.0. Maybe one day, I won’t have any extensions because everything is either built into Firefox or comes bundled with it. That is going to be an interesting time indeed.