firefox 3

On web pages with accented characters, such as on French language websites, Firefox 3 may show a diamond question mark symbol instead of the accented character.

To fix this character set display problem in Firefox 3, change the Character Encoding under the Menu -> View -> Character Encoding from Unicode to Western ISO-8859-1 if you’re reading Western European language based web pages.

Using keyword tag searching in Firefox 3 is broken and not working with OpenDNS.  Keyword tag searching, i.e. typing the letter G for Google in the address bar, then typing the search words or terms, then hitting enter, should do a google search.  If you’re using OpenDNS, Firefox 3’s keyword tag searching in the address bar gets hijacked by OpenDNS, returning OpenDNS results instead of Google search results.

To fix this, go into Firefox’s hidden configuration page by typing into the address bar “about:config”.

A warning will come up.  Just click “I’ll be careful, I promise”.

Then filter the items you’re shown by typing “keyword”.

Double click on the Value for Keyword.URL and replace the value with the following (without quotes) “http://www.google.com/search?q=”

Click OK.

Try doing a keyword tag address bar search in Firefox: “g peanut butter”. Hopefully you’ll get something like this:

You may have to quit and restart Firefox to have this change take effect.

With FireFox 3 some users have noticed that setting up custom keyboard shortcuts with Keyboard preferences pan no longer works.  Most noticeably, you can’t create a keyboard shortcut for going to your Home page in Firefox 3.

A remedy, although not a solution, is to use the built-in Home page keyboard shortcut for Firefox: alt + home or Option + home for Mac users.

Macbook users need to use the function key (fn) + option (alt) + left arrow key to get the “home” key normally found on full size keyboards, to apply the homepage keyboard shortcut.

It’s early in the honeymoon phase with Firefox 3 or more accurately infatuation “I just met you” phase, but FF3 appears as fast (or faster) than both Safari and Camino.  That’s fast.  Ridiculously fast when you consider that it has the power of the largest Add-Ons base, plus the best overall standards support of any web browser.

I performed a quick pseudo-scientific speed test among Camino 1.6.1, Firefox 3, and Safari 3.04, emptying caches and restarting each browser before loading the test site for each run and here are the results:

TripAdvisor.com

• Firefox 3 - 4.09 seconds
• Camino - 4.29 seconds
• Safari - 4.33 seconds

Cnn.com

• Firefox 3 - 4.98 seconds
• Safari - 5.15 seconds
• Camino - 5.3 seconds

Gmail.com

• Safari - 3.82 seconds
• Camino - 4.67 seconds
• Firefox 3 - 4.60 seconds

These are load times of the following home pages for my location (France), and my account, where applicable (i.e. Gmail).  The timer was stopped when the loading bar disappeared from the browsers.

Interestingly, Safari is still consistently fastest for Gmail.

The single biggest reason for my switching to Camino from Firefox was Firefox 2’s abysmal speed.  The other nice features of Camino included Flashblock/adblock, inline search+navigation (forward slash key, start typing, if inline search result is a link then hit enter to open the link), are now fully integrated into Firefox 3… plus FF3 is slightly faster.  I think this could spell the end of Camino for me… (for now).