Mozilla has been working hard to get Places into Firefox 3, and they are making some good progress. Back in September we saw a nice mockup of what to expect from the Places Organizer, and about a week after that Oropher pointed out in our forum that the first major UI change occurred.
At the time the only modification was the move away from the classic Menu Bar that resides in the current Firefox 2 bookmark organizer, but just today another new feature landed in the latest nightly build. It’s one that I have been anticipating for quite some time … “smart folders” (I made up the name). There are 6 smart folders that come with Firefox 3, and the bookmarks listed in each are generated on-the-fly like the Smart Playlists in iTunes. Here are the six folders that you’ll see in the latest nightly build:
- Recently starred pages
- Recently visited starred pages
- Most visited starred pages
- Recently used tags
- Most used tags
- Most visited pages
Below is a screenshot of what the smart folders and redesigned Places Organizer look like. What’s left to do in Places? They still have to add the history and downloads to it, but other than that they just need to add some polish. Oh, and they need to get the “Preview” feature working as you can see in the screenshot below. It’s supposed to show a thumbnail of the bookmark you have selected, but right now it is just a place holder.
Overall things are looking pretty good for the next milestone that’s due out on October 30th.
Yeah, menu-bar-less is the way to go nowadays. Are they gonna get online bookmark sync? That’s the part I was hoping for the most when I used Fx.
I think they plan on getting a backend implemented for that so extensions can work off it. I don’t think they were actually planning to make some sort of bookmark synchronization built-in though.
I love the fact that’s there are SOoo many features over v2. FF 2 didn’t contain as many, I’m finally switching for sure when 3.0 comes out. For that matter, FF1′s standards support was also sufficient to switch but I couldn’t easily adjust to it since I was so used to IE6.
I’m actually a bit surprised at how many nice features they have been able to get implemented, because the development process started off extremely slow. We didn’t start seeing the new features roll in until Alpha 4 or 5, because before then they were working on the new rendering engine. I believe that was worth it though as well, because pages load faster and there is now the real page zoom capabilities.
Wait, so when’s Fx3 supposed to come out? Like the official thing, not a beta or anything….
There’s no news on that yet. Mozilla is keeping any official schedule very tightly behind closed doors because they don’t want to be criticized for being late. They are estimating sometime in the first quarter of 2008 though (I think that’s what I read).