Firefox 3 will include some significant changes. It uses version 1.9 of the Gecko rendering engine–which itself hasn't been released yet and which includes the Cairo graphics layer.
There are also a wide range of improvements to performance, stability, and security, and it's also going to present several new user facing features.
Here is a quick recap of design work that's been going on in the Mozilla community over the past few weeks for Firefox 3.
Places: Bookmarking, Tagging and History
Places is our new infrastructure for storing bookmarks, history, and other information about Web pages. The current implementation of the Places system is still a work in progress, but the final version will support features like bookmark tagging, full-text indexing, extended metadata search, built-in syncing functionality, and support for exporting bookmarks in a broader number of formats.
Bookmars and Tags:
The bookmark manager gives us creative ways to sort our bookmarks:
these interfaces will allow users to organize bookmarks in the ways that work best for them, ranging from constructing traditional folder hierarchies to quickly searching a Web 2.0-esque tagspace. Places will also enable a lot of really innovative bookmarking, history and annotation extensions.
Malware Detection
Similar to how Firefox 2 blocks Web sites that are potentially going to try to steal your personal information, Firefox 3 will block Web sites that we believe are going to try to install malicious programs on your computer. Mozilla is coordinating with Google on this feature.
Content Handling
Firefox currently has different dialog boxes for dealing with content depending on if it has a MIME type, is a protocol, is being delivered through RSS, or is an application being downloaded. In addition to unifying our internal architecture for content handling we are also working on a unified content handling user interface. The user will have a consistent UI for selecting the actions they would like associated with content, regardless of if the content is a file being download or is a microformat embedded in a Web page.
Microformat Detection
You will see you mouse cursor changing and interact with microformatted content in the context of the Web page.
Private Browsing
The purpose of private browsing is to put Firefox into a temporary state where no information about the user's browsing session is stored locally. When in this state, the appearance of the location bar will change:
How you Can Contribute
- Provide feedback on any of these above features in their respective threads
- Create your own User Interface mockups of these Firefox features, using your favorite image editing application
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