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After trying it out for the past 24 hours, I must say I’m very impressed by the improvements over version 2. For starters, it has not hogged up to 500+MB of memory after a couple of hours, no crashes thus far too. Besides that, the new location bar (a.k.a. AwesomeBar) is simply fantastic. Most extensions have been updated to work with the latest version but you may have to switch to different ones if they aren’t updated anymore (or do some workarounds). Go get your copy of Firefox 3 here.

While on the subject of Firefox 3, BBspot has an article on it here. And before you go about saying ‘about time!’, BBspot is a satire news site. :P

      

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Just came across this recently..

I think it should be able to sell pretty well if it does go into mass production..

Source: Foxkeh’s Blog

      

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A Firefox extension (add-on) which enables a Firefox window to have multiple tabs tiled to however you like which is useful if you have a widescreen LCD monitor. To read more, click here.

      

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Encountered a problem where certain links which were happily opening up in new windows/tabs suddenly started opening up in your current tab? Check out the fix for it here.

      

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You probably would’ve noticed the dotted underlined red lines under misspelt words which are typed into text boxes/forms/fields. To me, it’s a rather welcomed feature since I use web applications and services quite a fair bit (I don’t misspell a lot, but automated checking is a bonus I guess ;)), but by default, the bundled dictionary is for the US locale which would complain when you spell ‘favour‘ instead of ‘favor‘.

Fortunately, it’s a rather easy to get around this, which is just to select and install the appropriate dictionary from here. Once that’s done, just right-click on any text box/field/form and you should be able to select the dictionary you want to use (screenshot below):

Once that’s done, you’re all set! :)

      

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Apparently it’s now officially called Firefox 2 and not two-point-o (2.0), so I’ve dropped the .0 from the title. :P

I usually use the shortcut keys ALT+I, ALT+B rather frequently at a forum I visit to get highlighted text in the post box to be italicised or bolded, but in Firefox 2, this shortcut keys no longer work by default. You now have to add the SHIFT key into the mix, so it goes ALT+SHIFT+I instead. If you don’t want to use the SHIFT key, you can edit two values in about:config (like for the close tab button previously):

Change:
ui.key.chromeAccess to 5
ui.key.contentAccess to 4

Taken from MozillaZine forum.

As for other about:config tweaks, head over to this page and for other Firefox tweaks, check this guide out. ;)

      

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One of the more obvious user interface changes in this version of Firefox is the position of the close button for tabs. Practically all other web browsers with tabs have tab closing buttons on each tab as opposed to Firefox’s choice of having it at the extreme right of the tab row up until now. With version 2.0, the default close tab button position is now on each individual tab.

This is probably a good decision in a way, but after such a long time of using Firefox, I’ve been too accustomed to the close button being there and would rather not have that change (I use the scroll button to close tabs nowadays, but selectively closing multiple tabs with the ‘x’ at the end is pretty useful). Fortunately there’s a setting which can be easily changed to accommodate the behaviour you want.

Here are the steps to have the close button back at same position as pre-1.5 days:

1. Type ‘about:config’ in the address bar.
2. In the filter textbox that appears below, enter ‘browser.tabs.closeButtons’.
3. Double click on the browser.tabs.closeButtons preference, and a message box should appear.
4. Change the value to ‘3′ and click OK.

And you’re back with the close button at the same position as before the latest upgrade! You can easily revert to the default Firefox 2.0 behaviour by changing the value back to 1.

Default:

After change of value:

Here are some other values you could use for that preference:

• 0 - Display a close button on the active tab only
• 1 - Display close buttons on all tabs (Default)
• 2 - Don’t display any close buttons
• 3 - Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior)

browser.tabs.closeButtons values and explanations taken from MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

      

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Update: Now officially out with a restyled website as well!

Although not out officially via the main Mozilla Firefox site, it’s currently publicly available on the servers for you to download and get it installed!

If you’re interested in knowing the list of new features that comes with this version, check out this page.

Download here.

The latest version should be made available via the automatic software update function relatively soon.

      

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