Technology

Firefox 3: Initial overview

The Firefox download day starts at 7pm tonight for us here in SA. Here’s the link if you haven’t pledged (or seen it) already.

However, FF3’s third Release Candidate is still accessible, and I managed to grab a copy. Not being an elitist fanboy snob, I generally test software for myself before calling judgments upon it, and I figured that FF3-RC3 will be close enough to the final release to deliver a useful report on it.

First impressions? Lightning-quick setup, absolutely. I also love the cleaner and crisper design of the toolbar and tab fields. They have several nice touches throughout - one example: the “Remember this password” dialog is now a flyout that doesn’t interfere with page loading.

I’m also very impressed at the speed with which it downloads pages. It might be an illusion, but I think FF3 takes the approach of “Download HTML > Grab as many elements as fast as possible, all at the same time”, instead of the top-down approach other browsers seem to take.

Basic memory usage - ~35MB at program launch. I opened Twitter, Facebook, WoganMay.com, Muti, Gmail, and two news blogs. The memory usage rose to ~120MB, and dropped back to ~85MB when I closed them all again. English: It handles RAM better than browsers before it. Flock, for instance, doesn’t free up RAM at all (at least, not enough to make a noticeable difference).

Apparently FF3 handles some CSS a little better (though I thought FF2 did a sterling job already). Overall, FF3 really is the lighter, faster browser we were promised.

Personally? I’ll stick to Flock for now. Just the integrated blogging and RSS-reader engines make it worthwhile for me, as does the slightly more modern interface. Firefox, though, can’t be beat for speed (and sheer anti-Microsoft sentiment) value, though.

Thanks to Gavin van Leylveld, we have the RC3 download URI: http://is.gd/z6r (if you want to jump the queue ;)

Tags: firefox, ff3, download, flock, comparison

Tags: Firefox 3, launch, review