soaked and soaped

As I wrote in a previous post I’m using testing versions of Firefox 3 for a while now.

With the final release coming nearer, I want to highlight features and improvements which–in my opinion–deserve more attention than just having their bug marked “VERIFIED FIXED” in bugzilla.

The search engine keywords are a new convenient way in Firefox 3 to use the search engines from the list in the top right, but without the hassle of switching to the right engine before searching. This makes the OpenSearch plugins much more attractive.

To set a keyword, click the search bar dropdown and select “Manage Search Engines…”.
If you set w as the keyword for Wikipedia, you can just type w something into the address bar and it will redirect you to the Wikipedia search results for something.

Ressources

Thanks to Jesse Ruderman for collecting a bunch of important improvements.
Also see Bugzilla #378553.

I just switched my default browser to Firefox Beta 5 from WebKit nightly. I’ve already used the previous 2 betas and was pretty impressed by it’s speed, the new location bar and the new password saving mechanism. So I give it a try as my default browser.

My must-have plugins, which currently make FF3 win over Safari3 are:

• the “GrApple Yummy” theme
• latest Firebug 1.2 Alpha

Though there are some interface issues, none of them is currently a blocker for me.