face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070608-afirst-look-at-firefox-3-alpha-5-gran-paradiso.html">Firefox
3 (
href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0a1/releasenotes/">Gran
Paradiso) should be available in beta form in late July 2007.
There is no firm release schedule for the gold version. The most anticipated feature will be a new way to store bookmarks.
Both the interface and the internal code will be changed.
Sort of like in del.ico.us, bookmarks can be given tags.
Unlike del.ico.us, you will still use folders.
Such a system is more complex, internally. To manage that,
the bookmarks will be stored in a SQLite database.
The rendering engine will be better. In particular, it will
offer better handling of scalable vector graphics.
The developers
href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_does_microformats_firefox3.php">hope
that Firefox 3 can be endowed with the ability to recognize the kind of
information it is displaying, and take appropriate actions.
For example, if it detects address information on the page,
it could offer to put that in your address book, or display it on a
map...
"Detecting
information in Web pages and handing that
information off to other applications changes the role of the Web
browser from being solely a HTML renderer to being an information
broker."
To work at all effectively, this would require a new kind of markup
convention. That is, the author of the page would
have to include tags to denote the address information.
Otherwise the whole thing would slow down and you would have
applications opening all over the place.
href="http://people.mozilla.com/%7Efaaborg/files/20061213-fundamentalTypes/informationBroker.jpg_large.jpg">
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">This could be
good. Rather than thinking of it as an
information broker, I like to think of a vacuum cleaner that is smart
enough to know when it has sucked up some coins, separate the coins
from the dirt, sort the coins, and package them in those little paper
rolls.
Now if we could only get it to keep the dirt from being displayed in
the first place.
This all sounds quite promising, but I hope they will also address some simpler, but more practical solutions. For instance, Firefox currently enables restoring of your previous session if either the browser or computer crashes. So why can't they enable the same convenience when you, for whatever reason, need to deliberately close Firefox?
I tried the alpha version. It's nice but it screwed my web browsing up something awful. I uninstalled it but it changed registry entries so I had to then uninstall Firefox 2.0.0.4 and re-install it.
The registry is a source of great evil. It makes much more sense to have a great many individual configuration files.
As for the first comment, try installing the extension, TabMix Plus. In the options dialog, under the "sessions" tab, you can set it to restore all tabs and windows from your last session.