Developing plans for Firefox 3

Wow! It looks like Firefox 3 will be the first web browser in a while that will be introducing new features! Alex Faaborg has posted some mock-ups of what Firefox 3 might look like.

Focus on security and privacy

Alex's mock-ups clearly shows Firefox 3 will be all about security and privacy. Firefox will be introducing some important changes to the location bar (below), as well as private sessions.

When in a private session nothing will be cached on the local system, and no addresses or cookies remembered during the session. The feature is intended to be used with online banks and so on. (Everyone knows that means porn.)

The location bar

The most important changes appears to be in the location bar. Where web publishers will loose some control. For instance favicons have to go. This to avoid sites mimicking secure connections by using a lock as a favicon.

Another change will be that non domain parts of URIs might be grayed out in an attempt to deal with spoofing URLs. It will be much harder to spoof an URL when it is made that much clearer:
http://www.somebank.com/homepage.html5

Another feature worth mentioning is the Microformats implementation called Pointers.

I think Firefox 3 will be really great. If these features turn out great, then it will be the first time Firefox have passed the Opera browser feature wise! With HTML 5 and CSS 3 right around the corner we will be looking at really interesting times on the web in the coming years…

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2 comments

I do look forward to the release, but I'm afraid Firefox is turning into an even more memory hungry application. Lets just hope they can keep it to a minimum, memory usage that is.

Comment by Kent Vegard Evjen (Subscribed) at 2007-06-14 @635.

The interface update looks awesome.. Can't wait for Firefox 3 to be released. Will be a great update.

Comment by Birger Nordølum at 2007-06-15 @944.