Firefox 3 Beta 4

Today I downloaded the fourth Beta version of Firefox since one of my friend told me that it featured some new interesting functionalities, he also gave me a promise that it would be faster than ever! With this promises in mind I moved my Firefox version 2 browser over to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html for my first experience of Firefox3.

After I had downloaded and Installed Firefox3 parallel with Firefox2, I pressed the “Mozilla Firefox3 Beta 4″ icon which launched the browser. I would want to be able to say that it loads a lot faster than the older version, but I only experienced minor improvements there, but hey it loaded pretty fast.
The first thing that caught my eyes were the new skin for the browser that featured new icons an a nice touch of graphite look for the actual skin (I run Vista on the test machine).

After surfing around for a while I discovered that the new browser actually seamed to perform better and that it loaded sites faster than before. First I thought that I might only had imagined this. But after a while I realized that it had to be faster. I found an article on ZDNet that provided test performance results of firefox3 compared with other different browsers. If the results of this test are correct it means that firefox3 finished the tests 3 times faster than firefox2, not to mention more than five times faster than IE 7.

So what has happened with the memory usage? I brought up my task manager and located the Firefox3 process, my process were consuming 25Mb of ram with only on instance of Firefox running. This is pretty much the same as the older version of the fox that consumes 26Mb with the same instance and sites running. But after running the two browsers for a while I saw that the new version performed better, this is probably because it is better at freeing up memory that are not used.  But isn’t 25Mb still a lot of memory? So it still eats some memory, but with todays memory pricing, who can complain?
I also read about the memory improvements on mozilla links and it seams that much improvements have been made to the memory management area. The article implies that a new “memory cycle collector” is in place, and that it frees up memory of modules that has requested memory but failed to release it properly.

Other features that I found to be a good contribution to the new version are,

• Full page zoom. You are now able to zoom the whole page including the images and not just the text that were possible in version2.
• The new address bar. At first I found it annoying having the title showing along with its URL, but after a while I began to appreciate this. I also read that Firefox3’s address bar will learn your surfing habits and tune it self for a more customized experience for the user.

A great summery of all Firefox improvements can also be found here on mozilla links.