Firefox Version 3 Nears Completion

By Greg McNevin

March 13, 2008: The next evolution of the hugely popular open source web browser Firefox is almost upon us, with version 3 beta 4 now available for public testing.

First impressions of the latest incarnation have pegged it as offering a significant performance boost, largely thanks to a change in the javascript engine, “profile guided optimisation” (read greater personalisation), improved memory use, and without a doubt at least a few of the 900 odd enhancements.

Based on the Gecko 1.9 platform, version three offers improved integration with Vista, Linux and Mac OS X, as well as and improved download manager, fancy new zoom features and a host of other tweaks and additions.

Performance appears to be the big drawcard though. In fact, Mozilla claims that some applications (such as Google Mail and Zoho Office) run up to twice as fast on Firefox 3.

As for fixes, if the memory leak that can see Firefox gobble hundreds of megs of RAM during long browsing sessions is fixed, Microsoft may see the little browser that could snapping at its heels ever sooner than expected.

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