Here’s one of the many small improvements in Firefox 3 Beta 1 that I really like:
Browsing a local folder in Firefox 2:
Browsing a local folder in Firefox 3 Beta 1:
This makes it so much easier to navigate your local files. And it’s not just eye candy — you can now sort the file listing on Name, Size, and Last Modified!
For a more complete coverage of Firefox 3 Beta, this article by Ars Technica is a good start.
Wow, this is great! How come I never find this?
Looks a lot better! I’ve tried it out and there are a lot of improvements! Looking forward to the release!
I was kinda bummed that browsing a chrome folder reverts to file:// upon click. But cool nonetheless!
I’d forgotten about that one!
Verry naaaiiiich says Borat!
One thing I’ve always wanted to see is a file manager implemented in FF. I know that this won’t happen (short of an extension) for various valid reasons, but an open source, multi-platform file manager could have so many benefits.
That’s Smokin! As my thermodynamics teacher used to say.
It is, in my humble opinion, a pity that all this really does is look prettier. It is not faster (slower, if anything, due to the extra css and images) and it does not provide additional functionality. The Suite still has the option to use XUL to display directories, which provides a more native-looking UI as well as a tree directory view, something which I’ve always thought was very useful. This feature was taken out for Firefox, and even though I filed a bug to bring it back long ago, nothing has happened (even on that bug – it wasn’t even WONTFIXed, which would put the matter to an end, albeit not a very pleasant one).
For this functionality to be useful to me, the directories must be listed at the top.
Gijs: Did you read the blog post at all? It does add functionality too.
David, it doesn’t add functionality when compared to the tree view, which is what I assume Gijs was talking about…
That said, I’d be interested in a performance comparison between this view and the tree view. Loading a local file listing got about 2x slower as a result of these changes, and it would be nice if we could get some more of that perf back…
Wow, this is a great new feature, any idea if it’ll be implemented for most file directory pages, such as raw ftp and server outputs?
Yes, this is how FTP looks, also.