Firefox 3. Interface Improvements

The developers of Firefox 3 are engaged not only in a major refinement of the Gecko rendering engine itself, the minor version of which in version 3 of this browser will differ by one from FF2 and will bring a lot of improvements , but also interface refinement.

So one of the most noticeable "chips" of the new interface can be the functionality of "beautiful switching of bookmarks."
There will be a function "view all currently open tabs":

When you press Ctrl + Tab, a black layer will appear with reduced copies of the contents of the bookmarks.


Of course this can not affect the use of resources. According to some reports , 40-50% of the processor is used when switching. I checked the extension on my laptop with a Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz (T2400) and a good external video. Indeed, if you press Ctrl + Tab and hold - the load grows to 50% - i.e. full load of one of the processor cores. When switching without holding, the load is around 20-25%.

Looks like a feature, in fact, so far not very much. The layer is loaded noticeably even on my machine with an index of 4.0 according to Vista gradation.
It is difficult to see something in the pictures, and the 16x16 favicoes stretched 4 times do not look like a fountain. (Below is a piece of undiminished clipping from this very black layer when switching by Ctrl + Tab)

However, the feature of viewing all current tabs with a filter for some reason works much faster, although the quality of the pictures is the same and the processor load is not less.
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Of course, this “glamor” was met with bolts on the gallant ENT. Some even offered to immediately throw everything and go live in Tyutkino to change the browser to Epiphany. Someone in a fit of rage even volunteered to dig out how to add the necessary plugins to him and still add them.

But firstly, the functionality is so far designed only as an extension and is not included in the browser code itself, and secondly, even if it is embedded in the browser itself, then it can be turned off for sure; On the other hand, for those users who are fond of ryushechki and are still sitting on the donkey of the “wrong” browser, there will be an additional incentive to change the browser, which of course is positive.

For my part, I want to say that I liked the preparation of the functional, and if the Mozillovists can bring it “to the mind” (optimize, improve the display), then why not? Especially since the feature is very similar to one of the features of Compiz, which, being introduced in the latest Ubuntu, proved to be a good boy, and I personally like it very much in terms of speed and functionality.