• Adjust the Smart Location Bar’s Number of Suggestions. The Firefox 3 feature that you’ll get to know and love the most is the new smart location bar’s as-you-type suggestions that learn where you probably want to go as you browse. But if you’re feeling like the number of suggestions is too high or too low? Adjust it to your liking in Firefox’s configuration area. Here’s how.

1. Enter about:config into the address bar and hit Enter.
2. Press the “I”ll be carefull. I promise!” button. (Because you will be.)
3. Enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults in the Filter field to reach this preference.
4. Set it to your desired number of suggestions. Three shown here.

• Shift+Delete Mistyped URL Suggestions. While the Smart Location bar is quite intelligent, if you enter an incorrect URL—say, to a page that doesn’t exist—Firefox 3 will still remember it and suggest it again later. (Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.) To remove a mistyped URL from your suggestion list forever, key down to the suggestion and type Shift+Delete.

• Set Gmail as Your Default Email Client - Without an Add-on. Here’s how to launch Gmail when you click mailto: links on web pages.

• Enable Spellchecking in one-line Input Field. This tweak goes back to Firefox 2, but is still just as useful and functional in Firefox 3, especially if you’re a web writer. In about:config, set layout.spellcheckDefault value equal to 2 to enable spell-checking in single line input fields as well as textareas. (Less typos in your email subject lines and blog post titles!)

Firefox 3 final is released to public early this morning, there are dozens of new features in Firefox 3 that I can’t specify all of them, but what I care and love most and would make the most dramatic difference in my future browsing come as follows.

• Multiple text selection. Now selecting text in Firefox is similar to selecting text in most text editors—just select your first piece of text, then hold Ctrl (or Cmd on Macs) to select other pieces of non-consecutive text.

• Stronger Phishing and malware protection. Firefox 3 has stronger filters and protection against malware, phishing sites, cookies, and other tools that compromise privacy and security. A malware warning shows up when you visit sites known to install malicious software, Firefox 3 doesn’t show the content of knock-off sites (like PayPal “Update Your Account” phishing scams) by default, and Firefox 3 checks against Google’s ever-growing blacklist of phishing sites. Now you can feel even better switching your less tech-aware relatives over to the open-source browser.

• Improved download manager. Never wonder where a download came from, or went to, again. Gran Paradiso’s download manager lets you search through recent files, resume big downloads after a crash or restart, and lets you keep an eye on your transfers in the status bar. This means the DownThemAll add-on is no more needed.

• Smart bookmarks. Much like iTunes’ Smart Playlists, Firefox 3’s new Smart Bookmarks function can analyze your browsing habits and create lists of links based on it. The default bookmark toolbar only comes with three standards, “Most Visited,” “Recently Bookmarked,” and “Recent Tags” (more on that later). What’s more, you can even add tag when adding a favorite bookmark.

• Smart Location Bar.Like a personal assistant who telepathically knows when you’re going to need just the right phone number (or Starbucks fix), Firefox 3’s address bar, now dubbed the Smart Location Bar, helps you get to your frequently visited, or recently discovered, sites in super-quick fashion. That application you just read about on Lifehacker, but can’t remember the name? Type “li” into your address bar, and Firefox instantly pulls the relevant sites from your history. The bar also learns through repetition, so the next time you start searching with “li,” it knows you’re looking for Lifehacker, not Linux.

What you’ll find in this release:

SDK Updates

This release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK, which now includes hooks for pre- and post-publish events. These updates are still experimental and these APIs are not stable–we may make changes based on your feedback that break plug-ins that use these new methods. However, we’re really excited about the new set of scenarios have been unlocked and look forward to hearing feedback from all of you Writer plug-in developers out there.

For more details about the SDK, please see the blog post on Windows Live Dev.

New Features

You’ll also get an early look at some improvements and new features we’ve been working on:

Video and Image Publishing Enhancements

• Upload videos to Soapbox
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Editing Enhancements

• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

UI Improvements

• Revised main toolbar
• Tabs for view switching
• Improved category control with search/filtering

Download Windows Live Writer 14 technical preview