Firefox 3 == awesome

Firefox 3 is almost certainly one of the best things ever! In the new url bar (aka the awesomebar I can type random things that I seem to remember from the title or url of random sites that I happen to have gone to and it knows where I want to go. For example, I type "s" and it knows I want the sprint board for work; "l" or "d" bring up my local development pages (l - localhost... d - localhost/dotnetnuke); "a" gets me Oren's blog. And those are just the pages I visit enough for Firefox to figure out that I want to get to them with only a single letter. Some others: "chad" (actually goes to another page in his blog, but that is one where he talks about a post I made), "scot", "guid" (a page I use to generate guids), "pex", and last but not least "still alive".

Also very cool is the star in the url bar: it "bookmarks" whatever page I want. Really all one click does is makes it so that firefox never forgets about a page you have visited (pretty much that is all I ever do, the bar is smart enough to figure out the page I want to visit without using the tag feature). But sometimes I need to give it a little more information, so I double click the star to give the page a tag or two (that way when I type in the tag, the bar responds with the tagged pages first).

That is really what I like about Fx3, but it is way more than enough. I've been using it since it was about to enter alpha 3 (I switched to the minefield nightlies at that time) and I haven't used Fx2 or IE since (well maybe IE every once in a while when I was tired of specific sites crashing in Fx or I needed to test my development items).

There are a couple things about it that I don't like:

• The skin; I can't stand it (I always liked Qute best; and luckilly Qute is available for 3)
• The dropdown listing all my open tabs (I tend to have 1 window with several hundred tabs open; the whole tab idea just doesn't seem to scale that far, I often lose tabs and find myself with 3 or 4 instances of the same tab open; some that I haven't viewed in days)
• The bookmark toolbar: totally pointless now (I have upwards of 2k bookmarks), except for the places folder (which is really cool and useful). I wish I could place the Places folder in the actual toolbar, just left of the back button.

But luckilly, the skin is easy to fix; the tab stuff isn't too big of a problem and the bookmark toolbar can be shut off (though I do hope someone out there is working on an extension to create a places button).