First Look at Firefox 3 Beta 2

By: Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

I'm keeping a close eye on the latest Firefox betas to be released by Mozilla.  The reason is that if past performance issues have been fixed, it’s quite likely that I might consider making a switch to it as my main browser.  While I find Internet Explorer 7 to be fine, I think that there would be advantages to switching to a unified browsing platform across Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

First Look at Firefox 3.0 Beta 2The Beta 2 of Firefox 3.0 represents the latest milestone.  Visually it looks virtually identical to the previous beta release, but under the hood Mozilla claim that a lot has changed:

Improved security features
Greater ease of use
More personalization options
Improved graphics and font rendering
Improved performance

You can find a complete listing of what’s new in Firefox 3.0 beta 2 here.

But it’s not new features that I’m interested in, it’s performance and reliability - so how does Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 stand up?  Well, it’s only been out a few hours but I’ve been hammering it hard on several systems and my feeling is that beta 2 is a significant improvement on beta 1.  Functionally and visually, beta 1 and beta 2 are hard to tell apart, but after a few seconds of using them side-by-side I think that I could tell them apart on pretty much any system.  Beta 2 feels snappier and far more responsive than beta 1 (or Firefox 2.0 for that matter) and I can feel the difference on all the systems that I’ve tried it on - from a lowly Sempron system to my quad-core monsters.  No matter what you want doing - opening a new tab, moving tabs, opening up Find, zooming in and out of the page, bookmarking - it all happens swiftly and smoothly.  Finally, Firefox feels like it’s back to being faster and more responsive than Internet Explorer.  The bloat seems to have been trimmed away and what remains is fast.

Article from ZDNET