I’m suitably impressed with Firefox 3 RC1. I’d come to accept with firefox 2 the clunkiness and lack of responsiveness in the GUI, especially when creating and switching tabs. I’m not sure whether it’s Mac-specific changes in the drawing code, but this is much less of a problem. For the first time firefox is a real contender in displacing Opera as my default browser. As the important dev plugins (Firebug, live HTTP headers, Web Developer, DOM Inspector) already work in FF3, webdev has certainly become less painful.
I finally got around to learning how to make search plugins: last time I wanted to, I assumed the editing functionality would be built-in to Firefox (like it is in Opera), or at least in an add-on. It isn’t (as far as I can see), but they’re pretty easy to create. Presenting Google Australia and Google Web (Australia).
It turns out they are based on the opensearch format, which is actually more flexible than Opera’s search.ini. It’s supported by internet explorer too! I’m looking forward to seeing Opera (which was ahead in the search-from-address bar game for a long time) moving to opensearch.