I have to say that I am a proud and happy user of Firefox, I keep it open all the time while I’m at work developing web sites, at home I never betray it with other when surfing the net, and I never miss the occasion to advice a friend to download it and start to use it.

Today, after one year and a half from the last mayor version,  Firefox 3 has been released promising substantial improvements.

Memory Leak issue
Probably the most well known negative aspect of Firefox is that after a while that the browser is running, it starts using excessively memory, this is know as memory leak. Fortunately in this new release the way how Firefox manages the memory has been improved and now it’s noticeable a huge difference in terms of overall speed.

User interface
A lot of work has been also done to improve the user experience adding new functionalities. It is more easy to access the bookmarks thanks to a new system of star rating, tagging and search functionality. The address bar is now a lot more flexible allowing users to use it not only to type in URLs but also to search websites already visited or search for bookmarks. The zoom re-sizes all elements of a viewed website (not only the text as it was in previous versions) this improves user experience for those with particular accessibility needs as it renders, scaled up or down, pixel perfectly, all websites independently from how they are developed.

Offline web applications
Switching Firefox 3 to “work offline” it is possible to use web applications without connection, data will be saved on the computer to be later synchronized on the server once an Internet connection has been detected. This is a new way how to use web applications and it is still in process of standardization within HTML 5 specifications.

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Microsoft presented the first public beta version of their new Internet Browser at the Mix’08 of Las Vegas: Internet Explorer 8.

Here at NSDesign we already started to give it a look and discovered many new interesting features. Apart from a few problems when opening up many tabs together, the browser seems to work pretty well, and the navigation interface, even with the addition of new functionalities, is simple to understand and doesn’t create so much confusion about how to use it.

Two functionalities that we found quite interesting are the crash recovery and the highlighting of the visited URL (to provide more security especially in the case of complex domain names that can trick the user).

These are not only the only new features, there are even more new features that developers can discover, in fact Microsoft, quite late (but never to late for something important like this), decided to pay more attention to the web standards making Explorer strictly standard compliant and other interesting features for developers.

Due to the fact that IE is the most used browser, this is a great news, in the future we are going to see more and more websites developed properly, providing completely accessible information contents. But not all good news come by their own, from another point of view a stricter browser can create some inconveniences to those people who own an old websites or those who have a website structured with not standard code, breaking their websites on the new browser. Explorer 8 offers versioning (backwards compatibility to make a website work like on older browsers versions, like Explorer 7, Explorer 6 and Explorer 5), it is an interesting functionality for a short term solution, but it doesn’t have to be considered a definitive solution to compatibility problems. The best way is always to use the correct standard codes, keeping separated content, structure and style.

Definitely the new Microsoft browser is optimum and can compete with other major ones like the new Firefox 3.

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