I’ve had chance to play around with the beta for Firefox 3 and so I thought I would jot down a few notes on what I have seen so far this first post will focus on security which is close to my heart.
In short I love it, I’ve always been a fan of Firefox and although the last version had a few issues that wound me up almost to the point of reverting to the previous version this version as far as I can tell addresses those issues and continues to build on what is a really great browser.
Nowadays we spend most of our time in our browser as our lives become digital, not necessarily a good thing as seen in the news recently, but in any case we want a browser to be secure and usable and that is one thing that Firefox has always been.
Some of the new security features that Firefox 3 introduces includes more information on the site you are viewing especially if it is a secure site so that you know more about where you are. The first of these are the quick references about the identity of site which can be seen by clicking on the icon as seen below.
This is the non-SSL screenshot:-
The SSL version:-
By clicking on the ‘Tell me more about this site…’ you get the security page from the redesigned page info window. This give you greater information on the site you are on and allows you to tweak preferences for this site surrounding privacy and security.
Changes to how the password manager now prompts to store an entered password are in so you can now decide after knowing the password is correct or not and avoid cluttering auto complete lists, aleo sites known for serving spyware, rootkits, viruses, diallers and other kinds of malware will trigger an antimalware alert. The list of known malware sites is provided by stopbadware.org and served by Google.
Finally not a security feature but will lead into the next post on Firefox 3 and that is that currently Firefox has moved to full page zoom rather than text only…
