In his regular Thursday feature, Post tech columnist Rob Pegoraro does a first-look review of Firefox 3.
After a couple of days using the new version of the already excellent browser, I’m pretty happy with the increased speed and the fact that it doesn’t seem to choke on certain sites nearly as much as it used to.
I suppose the new security features are nice, although I’ve never had any trouble steering away from suspicious sites.
However, there’s one item in the Firefox feature set highlighted by Pegoraro that puzzles me.
If, however, you’re a bookmark-tending type, Firefox 3 can help you make more sense of your Web favorites. You can tag them for easier reference, then sort through to see which ones you visit most and which ones collect dust.
Bookmarks? Saving a list of sites to a single computer really doesn’t make much sense anymore.
But having enough of them that you’d need to tag them for “easier reference” indicates that local bookmarking is probably the wrong tool for the job.
Especially if you consider that there are plenty of reliable web-based applications like del.icio.us that allow tagging, as well as sharing, and generally other do a much better job than any browser could.
I never got the hang of del.icio.us. It’s too clunky for my taste. I hate to have to go to a Web site, or install even more add-ons, to access my bookmarks.
It may be antiquated if you’re an on-the-go type, but for those who do most of their computing on just one or two computers, it makes sense. Local bookmarks are faster to access than web-based ones on many connections, and if your bookmarking site is down, you’ve still got your bookmarks.
Ok, so maybe antiquated may not have been the right term. :-)
But even if you use one machine all the time, del.icio.us still has three big advantages over browser bookmarks. You can annotate the entries, it’s easy to search them (although I haven’t tried the searching features in FF3), and, most important, you can easily share any or all of your entries with anyone.