What so special about Firefox version 3
Firefox 3 has been in the news ever since its release in June, 2008. Here are a few pieces of news that might pique your interest. We already know that Microsoft and Adobe both have their very own graphics applications namely SilverLigh and Flash. So looks Mozilla too has decided to be a part of the rat race.
Mozilla released TraceMonkey for native compilation of code. TraceMonkey helps SpiderMonkey to compile native code. Mozilla is planning to release the alpha version of Firefox 3 that is Firefox 3.1. TraceMonkey will also be released along with Firefox 3.1. Right now TraceMonkey is not available since there are a lot of bugs in it.
TraceMonkey has been built with the help of Andreas Gal, a research scientist from UC. The technique behind TraceMonkey is called a Trace Trees. JavaScript code can slow down your engine performance. SpiderMonkey is a JavaScript engine and with the help of TraceMonkey the speed of the engine doubles up. Image editing has become much more faster and responsive with the help of TraceMonkey.
The goal behind inventing TraceMonkey was to increase the capability of Firefox 3 and improve its performance. The compiler used by TraceMonkey will be the Just In Time compiler. TraceMonkey will enable Yahoomail and Gmail to run faster as they both are JavaScript based applications and are widely used.
With the help of TraceMonkey the browser will be able to do newer things as well as a new desktop application will be available. This is definitely a big goal for Mozilla to achieve since it’s success will lead to surprising and new applications. We all know about the Extend Firefox 3 contest that was going on. It was started to encourage the development of Firefox 3 compatible add-ons.
The contest which began on 17th March, 2008 ended on 4th July, 2008. The winners were announced on 4th August 2008. A panel of judges was set up to judge the contestants and their offerings. The criteria for judging the candidates were open standards, innovation and user experience. Also, there was a contest for the best updated add-on and best music add-on.
There were three winners each for the first two categories and one for the last category. The prizes were no doubt fabulous. The three best new add ons were Pencil, Tagmarks and HandyTag. Pencil was a tool for drawing diagrams prototyping the GUI. Tagmarks allowed to add tags to bookmarks very easily. HandyTag allowed easy retrieval of keywords for bookmarks. The best updated add ons were Read It Later, TagSifter and Bookmark Previews. Read It Later allowed you to save pages that are of interest to you so that you can read them later.
This way in the Mozilla Firefox you don’t have to clutter your bookmarks with sites that are of not much interest to you. Read It Later also allowed for RSS Feed Creation, offline reading, etc. Once you select a tag, TagSifter provides you with a list of related bookmarks and tags. This allows for easy searching of tags. As the name suggests Bookmark Previews allows you to see thumbnail icons and album views of bookmarks. But apart from that it also allows you to preview the bookmark in the sidebat menu.
The Best music add on was Fire.fm. It provided you with multiple capabilities. First of all you could listen to music by your favorite artist. You could browse for new artists and new music. Similarly, you could search for and find Last.fm users who have the same taste of music as yours. Also, via Fire.fm, users could access most wanted radio stations by searching for them.
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Tags: Firefox Help, Spread Firefox
