Firefox 3 Release Around The Corner
A brand new version of the Firefox browser is ready to be released Tuesday with upgrades on speed, design, and security. Several of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve the bookmarks.
The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new “Places” feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven’t bookmarked. There’s also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list — similar to what’s already available on Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer 7 browser.
Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn’t disrupt the log-in process. In a nod to the growing use of Web-based e-mail, the browser can be set to launch Yahoo Inc.’s service when clicking a “mailto” link in a Web page, the ones you might come across clicking on a name or a “contact us” link. Previously such links could only open a standalone, desktop e-mail program.
Yahoo is the only Web service initially supported. To use rivals like Google Inc.’s Gmail and Microsoft Corp.’s Hotmail, developers of those services will have to enable that capability first. Firefox also will start blocking rather than simply warning about sites known to engage in “phishing” scams that try to trick users into revealing passwords and other sensitive information. The new version adds protection from sites known to distribute viruses and other malicious software.
The list of suspicious sites come from Google Inc. and StopBadware.org, a project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities. Security researchers who need access to problem sites can manually turn the feature off.