Day: May 22, 2008

Continuing the saga of the Firefox 3 (FF3) trial, I just installed the beta version of the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox 3 (see previous post). Bookmarks are one of the key new features of have FF3 (see Top 10 Firefox 3 Features (Lifehacker) and Create Your Own Smart Bookmarks on Cybernotes), and I was interested in seeing how they worked with the new plugin. I made a small Jing screencast (sorry no sound) which shows that the del.icio.us plugin works much the same way as it did on FF2 with one small difference. If you bookmark using FF3 bookmarks, a pop-up asks you if you want to also bookmark at del.icio.us too. This might prove either to be useful or annoying depending on how you regard pop-ups! [A similar feature was already present in the Flock browser]

Personally, I rarely use browser-local bookmarks because I move around from machine to machine and rely on the internet to keep my collection in one place and available everywhere. However, perhaps with the advanced bookmarking features added to FF3, the del.icio.us integration and FF3 bookmarking tools may prove to be a winning combination.

A problem with Firefox 3 is that not all plugins are ready for deployment. The attached image shows my current set (on my laptop I have a couple more). Of particular note are del.icio.us, ScribeFire (for in-browser blogging) and Zotero (bibliographic database).

Google gears is also not yet compatible so support for offline working for Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Docs will not work. I find that I don’t travel enough with my lap top for this to be an issue.

I assume that most plugin providers are waiting on the final release before upgrading their plugins, but if any plugin is important to you, it might be worth holding off installing Firefox 3 for now. If you want to try it, a portable version of Firefox 3 RC1 that runs from a USB memory stick is also available. Alternatively you can run Firefox 2 and 3 on the same machine if you create a new profile for the latter. I wish I’d done that!

Update

I just discovered that there’s a beta version of the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox, so that’s one indispensible tool that I won’t have to live without!

I installed release candidate 1 of Firefox 3 today. I will be giving it a trial run and reporting on any nice features in a future blog. First impression: nice sexy Windows Vista look and friendly welcome page (illustrated). I’ve only installed it on my office desktop so far because my laptop is my main machine and it has a few plug-ins that might not work. So I’m hanging fire there which gives an opportunity for comparison.