Firefox 3 is a massive upgrade from Firefox 2 with more than 14,000 changes to the 2.0 generation that was released in October 2006. The great majority of those changes happened under the bonnet and aren?t immediately visible, but there are enough user-centric improvements to make this new version a worthwhile update.

If you expect Firefox 3 to be drastically different in appearance, features and UI philosophy than the previous version, then you will be disappointed up to the fact that you may wonder if this new browser should have been an incremental and minor upgrade instead. For instance, when you first fire up Firefox 3, you will hardly notice any visible difference to the previous version. However, there was nothing really wrong with the previous interface anyway and we are just fine with an evolutionary modification.

One of the most exciting new features of Firefox 3 I think is the full page zoom; from the view menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.

So will this mean more for web accessibility in the future or will it just be a clever little gimmick? I think it could be tremendously useful, imagine if instead of increasing or decreasing your browser text, which alters the page layout you could just change the zoom percentage of your browser. That would mean your layout would always remain the same which would do away with liquid or elastic layouts and we could all concentrate on fixed width design. Now I?m not saying that this will happen, but it will certainly give the age old debate about fixed vs liquid vs elastic (http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2004/07/21/fixed-liquid-elastic) a new angle.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.