At 1:00pm EST today, Firefox 3 will be available for download, and the browser wars will begin anew:
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 3 on Tuesday, and the open-source project is opening a new front in the browser wars.
As the Web transforms from a static repository of content into a foundation for applications such as word processors and graphics editors, browsers are growing up from mere gateways into the tool that makes those applications possible. In this new era, it’s Firefox–the heir to the Netscape legacy–that’s going up against the victor of the last era, Internet Explorer.
“It gives you the horsepower you need to experience rich Internet apps as they should be from a performance standpoint,” said Damon Sicore, Mozilla’s director of platform engineering, mentioning Gmail and Google Maps specifically as applications where users don’t want to wait. “As these apps get bigger and more complicated, faster browsers are going to become more critical.”
Specifically, it takes 60 milliseconds to change Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3, Sicore said, compared with 413 milliseconds for IE 7 and 227 for Firefox 2.
Faster browsing is great, but what about my personal Firefox pet peeve, memory usage ?
Faster performance is one Firefox 3 improvement Sicore points to. Two others are better memory handling and what’s known as the Awesome Bar.
To test memory use, Firefox programmers load 500 pages from top sites on the Web then closes and opens them thousands of times. Through that process, Mozilla stamped out many memory “leaks” under which Firefox 2 wouldn’t relinquish memory once it was no longer needed, Sicore said. The company also reduced the amount of memory the browser requires overall.
Sounds good to me, but we’ll see how it performs.
June 17th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I haven’t downloaded it yet, but I do hope the memory management is better. I like that it saves the open tabs, but I still don’t like to have to close and reopen.