\jeff{krimmel}

Instantaneous Back and Forward in Firefox

As a result of reading this article about the improvements to the commonly used back and forward features in Firefox to make them “blazingly fast”, I decided to go ahead and grab the most recent nightly Firefox build to try it out. After downloading the archive and unpacking it, I simply had to follow the instructions here, and I was good to go. This second site even gives you a specific website combination on which to try the revamped back and forward features.

My impression? Wow. Fast. Instantaneous even. This is what Opera users have been used to for a long time, and now Firefox is catching up. I also noticed that the scrolling is faster (and lags less) than in the stable Firefox builds. I’ve not noticed any bugs with the feature yet, but the moment you search around for any information, you see disclaimer after disclaimer letting you know this is not a stable build.

I decided I owed it to my own curiosity and to the community to try the feature out extensively. If I do find a bug, I am definitely going to report it. I would love to see this feature included in a stable release sooner rather than later. It’s not the difference between Firefox being usable and being not usable (Firefox is quite usable to begin with), but it is a nice added feature that I think most users will notice within minutes of use.

And, by the way, that keyword bookmark feature…sweet. I can’t count the number of times I’ve done the “word whatever” trick in the past couple of days. Quite nice.