Firefox 3 Improves Again
March 11th, 2008 (2:00pm) Mike Gunderloy 4 Comments
We’ve been tracking the progress of Firefox 3 as it wends its way through the beta process – web workers in general seem to have adopted Firefox even faster than the general population. Now Beta 4 is out (release notes here), offering incremental but useful changes from beta 3.
In my own early testing, the most significant improvements here are in performance; I’m seeing both memory and CPU load lowered from beta 3, and I’ve not yet had beta 4 spike to 100% CPU (which was frequent for me with beta 3). Other changes include full-page zooming (which zooms graphics as well as text), a better algorithm to help guess what you’re typing into the address bar, and more native look and feel on all platforms. There are still some significant bugs (in areas such as MathML, displaying GMail, and difficulties with WMP), but overall, Firefox 3 is a big improvement over version 2 even at this point in its lifecycle.
4 Comments Post your own comment
dawn says: March 11th, 2008 3:47pm
The new beta does look awfully nice but it about breaks my heart to lose greader. Can’t wait ’til it catches up!!
Richard Haven says: March 11th, 2008 5:40pm
How does its performance and memory use compare to Firefox 2 ?
Timmy says: March 11th, 2008 5:42pm
I wonder if firebug will run better.
Mike Gunderloy says: March 11th, 2008 6:07pm
I’m finding performance to be better, and memory use lower, than it was in Firefox 2. There are so many variables, though, that you’ll have to see how it stacks up with your own usage patterns.