Firefox 3 to Be the Fastest Browser
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is already available in
more than 45 languages as a public preview release intended for
developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as
dramatic
improvements to performance, memory usage and speed.
While Firefox 3 boasts some great new features like a smart address bar and better bookmarks manager, the best reason to upgrade will be for the performance improvements. Firefox 3 is noticeably faster and more stable than Firefox 2 to the casual user and Mozilla engineers have numbers that show it will be the fastest browser on the market.
New features and enhancements of the new browser include:
- Performance - profile guided optimizations (PGO) provides an optimized Firefox build based on the way it internally works; JavaScript is about three times faster than Firefox 2 implementation; memory cycle collector frees memory no longer used by modules that requested it but failed to release it properly.
- Places - integrated history and bookmarks manager interface powered by SQLite, a small open source database engine that provides much more robust querying capabilities. You are able to search your history, tags and bookmarks with a fully fledged search interface.
- The Location Bar - autocomplete list that appears when you start entering letters in the location bar is no longer restricted to web addresses but also looks into bookmark and history page titles and tags which make it more comprehensive.
- Visual Refresh - theme updates in all platforms with a strong emphasis in making Firefox feel as a native application on each operating system.
- Tabbed Browsing - Tabs scroll smoothly; when closing several tabs and windows at once you will be prompted if you want to save the currently open tab set: a good catch and a good way to introduce this helpful feature to new users.
- Web experience - Firefox can save site specific preferences.
- Search engines - the search engine manager lets you set and change keywords for search engines.
- Downloads - downloads can be paused and resumed across sessions, limited only by the server capabilities.
- Add-ons - the Add-ons Manager has been integrated with Mozilla Add-ons, Mozilla’s official extensions and themes repository, providing recommendations, search, rating and add-ons install without leaving Firefox.
- Security - all visited sites will be checked with a list of known malware sites -provided by stopbadware.org and served by Google- to prevent spyware, rootkits, viruses, dialers and other kinds of malware from even being offered to you.
Check out the complete field guide to testing Firefox 3 if you want to make your extensions work with the RC. If you're already using Firefox 3, be sure to type
about:robots
into the address bar to discover a fun little Easter egg. For a detailed list of what Firefox 3 has to offer, check out its release notes.
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