Introduction

On November 9th, 2004, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross released Mozilla Firefox version 1.0. Since then, Firefox has come a long way and on June 17th, 2008, Firefox 3.0 was made available for download from Mozilla’s website. Firefox 3 is free, and available for variety of operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux. This article explains the main features of Mozilla Firefox 3.0, how it differs from earlier versions of Firefox.

Bookmarking and Tagging

One of the major changes in Firefox 3 is the interface of managing bookmarks. In version 3.0 there is a star icon at the end of the location bar which allows you to add bookmarks and create new tags. When you click on the star icon, it displays a dialog box which lets you bookmark your favorite pages.

Firefox 3 lets you tag your bookmarks; you can label a site with categories that are meaningful to you. For instance, you can label www.facebook.com with the “Social Networking” tag as well as the “Social Utility” tag. When you enter the text “Social Networking” into the address bar, the dropdown box will show you a list of sites that are tagged with the label “Social Networking”. A single website can have several tags, and there is no limit for tag creation.  With a single click on the star icon at the end of the address bar, you can bookmark a site and then tag it with just two clicks.

To bookmark a site and tag it, just follow the following steps:

Type the website address and press Enter.

Once the Star icon appears at the end of the location bar, single click on the star icon. You will see Edit This Bookmark popup.

Now, The name text box will automatically fetch the Website title (but you can delete it and enter whatever name you want for it).

Now you need to select a location where the bookmark will be saved. In the drop down box, you will see three options: Unsorted Bookmarks, Bookmarks Menu and Bookmarks Toolbar. If you save your bookmark under the Bookmarks Menu, it will create a button on your Bookmarks Toolbar. [Note: If you are not able to see the Bookmarks Toolbar, click on View > Toolbars > and select Bookmarks Toolbar.

If you select the Bookmark Menu to save your bookmark, the bookmark will be saved in the Bookmark Menu.

If you select Unsorted Bookmarks, the bookmark will be saved under Unsorted Bookmarks. To view these bookmarks, click on History > Show all History or press Ctrl+Shift+H. A Library window will be displayed similar to this:

You can also create folders for better categorization of your bookmarks. To create a folder, you need to select a location where you want to create the folder. There are three categories which I have already mentioned above.

Click on the Star Icon and then the Folder combo box. You will see a screen similar to this:

Now, select the desired location i.e. Unsorted Bookmarks, Bookmarks Menu or Bookmarks Toolbar.

Once you are done with your category selection, click on the New Folder button.

 Now type a Folder name and click on Done!

Once you have bookmarked the site, you may create Tags for that bookmark. To create a tag(s), you need to perform the following steps:

Click on History > Show all History or press Ctrl+Shift+H. This will display the Library Window:

Select the bookmark for which you want to create tags. In the above example I have entered “Social_Networking” as a Tag.

A single bookmark can have multiple tags. To create multiple tags, you just need to enter multiple tag values separated by a comma (e.g. Social_Networking, My_Website etc...).

Once you have successfully created the tags, you can use these tags instead of typing the full website address. Consider the following Example:

In the above example you can see that I have just entered a few words of the tag (“Social_netw…”) and the site www.facebook.com  is automatically listed in the dropdown popup box.