Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new "Places" feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven't bookmarked.
There's also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list — similar to what's already available on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser.
Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn't disrupt the log-in process.
Firefox also will start blocking rather than simply warning about sites known to engage in "phishing" scams that try to trick users into revealing passwords and other sensitive information. The new version adds protection from sites known to distribute viruses and other malicious software.
The list of suspicious sites come from Google and StopBadware.org, a project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities.
Security researchers who need access to problem sites can manually turn the feature off.
Firefox 3 also offers speed and design improvements — the back button is now larger than the forward button, for instance, because people tend to return to a previous page more often, said Mike Schroepfer, the project's vice president of engineering.
