When I Was Young

From TECHNOLOGY

MY PAPER TUESDAY JUNE 17, 2008

NEW YORK

A NEW, highly anticipated version of the Firefox Web browser is scheduled for release today, with improvements in security, speed and design.

Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. Web surfers can add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new “Places” feature lets users quickly access sites they bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but have not bookmarked. There is also a new starred button for easily adding sites to your list.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that does not disrupt the log-in process.

In a nod to the growing use of Web-based e-mail, the browser can be set to launch Yahoo’s e-mail service when clicking a “mailto” link on a Web page, which one encounters when clicking on a hyper-linked name or a “contact us” link. Previously, such links could only open a standalone desktop e-mail program.

Yahoo is the only Web e-mail service supported. To use rivals like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail, developers of those services will have to enable that capability first.

Firefox will also block rather than simply warn about sites known to engage in “phishing” scams that try to trick users into revealing passwords and other sensitive information.

Firefox is the No. 2 Web browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and is from Mozilla, a community in which thousands of people, mostly volunteers, collectively develop free products.

- AP