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.

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.

For the past week, I have been using Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9, codename Minefield. I generally wait till the Beta to try the upcoming version of Firefox but due to the fact I was using a temporary computer with no bookmarks or extensions to break, I decided to give it a good test run. I am extremely happy with a lot of the small changes that I came across in the alpha.

The first apparent change is with the way it handles saving password details. It is so much better than currently in Firefox 2. When you log into a website, there is no more pop-up asking you if you want to save the password for this site. Now it comes up with a small, non intrusive alert message underneath the tab bar. It is better in the fact that you it does not require you to choose an option before you can continue logging on and allows you to select an option after you have logged on to the site. This is great if you are not sure what the password is and lets you make sure you have the password correct before you let Firefox save it.

They have also redone the bookmarks system. This is still in early development and was only added to the alpha about a week or two ago. I haven’t had a good play with it considering I started fresh with no bookmarks. I think that this is going to be way better than the current system, much faster too and display more information. Probably the major thing Places is adding to the bookmarking system is tags. The allows you to easily categorize bookmarks and find/access them. One thing I don’t understand is the reason to star webpages. When you star something it doesn’t bookmark it so I don’t really see the point of it. I am sure there is a reason for it, I just haven’t been told it. I can’t wait to see Places evolve through the alpha and betas of Firefox 3.

The address bar does a little more than it does in 2.0. Now when you type in a query in the address bar, it also shows the titles of webpages and searches them for the query as well as parts of sites. For example if you typed in yum9me in the query bar, it will show the sites in your history that have yum9me in the web address and the title of the webpage. This makes it easier go to pages you already have been too but there is also a disadvantage. Lets say you were going back to a site you visited about about pork and you type “por” in the address bar, included with the site about pork will be any site you have been to with porn in the title and in the URL. That is the disadvantage of the improved address bar but lucky this wouldn’t be a problem for me

Finally, one of the things I love the most is quitting the browser. On the even of you quitting, the message that alerts you that you are closing “x” amount of tabs is a lot more useful. Not only does it alert you, it now gives you options. You can either quit the browser, save your session and quit or cancel back you didn’t mean to quit. This is very useful in my opinion because it gives you the option to save the session or not. Sometimes I will want all of these tabs to open again next time I open Firefox and sometimes I might want to start a fresh session next time. Well it now gives you the flexibility to do this easily by deciding when you quit. If you don’t need this, there is always the option to never show this message again. I love how the alpha manages quitting in a much more useful way then before.

Well that is my first impressions of the Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9. There is more to it than the things I have mentioned, I just can’t remember some of the other features added and a lot of the stuff will be hidden under the hood. I think Firefox 3 is going to be a great product when it gets released sometime next year. I am looking forward to it. The thing I hate the most about having used Alpha 9 was going back to Firefox 3 and missing some of the cool features. It is a bit like how I feel about Vista, there are some small features in Vista that I really miss when going back and using XP. It’s going to be nice to see how Firefox 3 handles the extensions I use as well as how Places works with the 512kb of bookmarks I have in Firefox.