The group that makes the Firefox browser Mozilla has released a preview of the next Firefox 3 Web browser that aims to boosts security, speed, and ease of use. The release is tad delayed than originally expected, but from the early looks of the Firefox 3 beta 1 browser it was worth the wait.
The software is available for download today for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. But a word of warning to those eager to start using the latest Firefox browser - this beta still has some bugs and not all Firefox extensions work with this beta release.
A number of meaningful improvements are noticeable with this release, chiefly the speed. In my first look at Firefox I noticed the browser shuts down and loads noticeably faster on my PC as do Firefox's tabs as well.
(Here is an error Firefox delivered when visiting Yahoo Mail)
Web pages with this release are supposed to render faster ? especially Web 2.0 sites that use advance coding. I didn't notice this to be true in my limited testing. I will say some sites such as Yahoo Mail, that are heavily dependent Ajax, displayed several error messages.
On the other hand you'll also notice with this beta Firefox has made some nice design improvements to make common browser tasks easier. One handy new search feature automatically allows you to scour your browser history straight from the address bar. Start typing keywords of Web sites you've visited and Firefox pre-populates the URL in the address field of the closest match.
(Searching Web history is easy. Just start typing the site you're looking for in the address bar.)
On the security front Firefox 3 now more prominently highlights site forgery protection alerts as well as including a redesigned SSL error pages - both designed to keep you from falling prey to a fake Web site prompting you to hand over personal identifying information. Also now baked into the browser is anti-malware protection for Web sites along with Firefox's download manager's new ability to work with existing anti-virus software to scan downloads.
There is no announced date for the final release of Firefox 3.
I am an ie7 fan and can tell you that ie7 allows searching of web history from day one.
I'm using firefox 2 right now and you can search the history in the address bar, been able to do that for as many versions of firefox as I can remember. It's hardly a new feature.
I think that this means that not only can you search addresses in the history, but keywords as well.