I gave up waiting for Firefox 3 and decided to just try the Firefox 3 beta, starting with beta 3 a few weeks back. I have had nearly zero stability issues with it so far and definitely recommend it to anyone beginning to lose patience with Firefox 2’s poor memory handling, slow page rendering, and non-native widget controls (for the Mac version)… just as I had. Firefox 3 exceeds its predecessors in almost every way, but the most apparent and the most useful of all that I’ve seen so far is the new Location Bar, also dubbed the AwesomeBar by some of the Mozilla folks.

The new location bar has a few new features. The first is that instead of trying to match what you’re typing with the beginning of URLs in the history (eg if you typed “ring” as I did above, it would only show URLs in the history starting with “ring”, such as, perhaps “ringmaster.com” but not “lordoftherings.net”), it will now show any URL which matches your search term anywhere in the URL or in the page title, as seen above. The second major new feature is that it learns as you use it. If, when typing “ring”, I frequently select the Ring of Fates walkthrough (the second link in the dropdown menu above), then after a few times it’ll start putting that link at the top of the dropdown menu instead, so it’s easier for me to select it.

I’m really enjoying using the AwesomeBar, especially when I often visit sites or pages with cryptic URLs that I don’t remember. I know there are those out there who dislike it, but I find it ever so helpful in my daily web browsing experience. If you find you really can’t stand using it, there are ways to disable the new behaviour, but frankly I can’t really see what that would be the case. The functionality is so useful that I’d rather modify the way I use the location bar to take advantage of this new behaviour than to complain that my old way of doing things is no longer effective.

As an aside, I also really like the improved Add-ons manager. You can now search for new plugins directly through this interface, and the prompt to restart Firefox to enable a new theme or plugin is much more seamless now.

And I am very, very pleased with the native widget controls on Mac OS X. They could afford to be a bit more Mac-like: the drop-down menu in particular isn’t quite accurate enough. But it’s much better than what it used to look like in previous versions of Firefox.

The new default theme on the Mac version, however, I do not like so much, and I recommend the GrApple themes from Arronax for a much more streamlined and native-looking Mac Firefox UI.