Firefox 3 Review - Looks Promising

After reading an article over at Ars Technica, I decided to give the new Firefox 3 beta a try. According to their article the speed gains and memory usage benchmarks were very impressive, so obviously I wanted to give it a try.

Before installing I wanted to make sure that the install would not overwrite my current install. Just in case I hated it or something, I wanted to make sure I could still run my old Firefox. Once the precautions were made and I made sure it was installing to a totally different directory, I made the install.

I would have to say that out of the box, so to speak, I was pleased to see that it kept my current Firefox bookmarks and I did not have to import them. I was even more pleased to see that some of my Firefox add-ons still worked and as they were imported also. As I started to browse the web I noticed that pages that normally loaded in a second or so, were almost instant. Many of the sites that I tried out were big sites that were generated by code like PHP, MYSQL queries, and some Java. It seems like they have made some major improvements in code parsing for pages and they load much faster than IE7. I have not tested it against Opera or Safari myself, but I plan to soon and run a follow up report.

Overall, I would have to say that Firefox 3 is looking to be a powerhouse browser with security and speed in mind. I did not even have time to check out the security features before wanting to write this post, but they are said to be just as robust as in the past. I will probably run another follow up on the latest security features as well. Ars Technica had focused on the fact that the new browser uses so much less memory than other new browsers, so maybe that is part of its overall new blazing speed. I am impressed and look forward to the final release.

Below is a picture from the Ars Technica article. Read their full article here.