Stan Beer
Tuesday, 11 March 2008 09:35
Opinion and Analysis
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I don't know about others but I was personally disappointed with Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 after the dazzling performance improvements of Beta 2. However, after five minutes of mucking around with Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 I am once again marvelling at the speed and regularity that Mozilla is releasing significant incremental improvements to its newest browser. In a word, this latest browser simply flies.
According to Mozilla, Firefox 3 Beta 4 includes
more than 900 enhancements from the previous beta, including drastic
improvements to performance and memory usage, as well as fixes for
stability, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.
To tell the truth, I found the previous Beta fairly stable - I've been
using it for the past month without any problems. And as far as user
interface improvements are concerned - well I don't really see all that
much difference aside from a colour change here and there. However, I
can notice the memory and performance improvements.
Anyone who uses Vista like me (yes I admit it) might care to try a test
of loading an IE7 page and the same Firefox 3 Beta 4 page. If you
believe the memory sidebar gadget then you'll find that loading the
Firefox page uses somewhere between 20-30% less memory than the IE7
page - a crude test I know but hey it's Microsoft's own measurement
tool.
As far as performance is concerned, some initial testing showed that
page loads were definitely faster than IE7 - say 10-15%. However, the
speed of page loads compared to the previous two Beta versions appears
marginal.
What is noticeable, however, is the speed of SaaS applications like
Google Mail and Google Docs. According to Mozilla, "improvements to our
JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted
in significant improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web
applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in
Firefox 3 Beta 4." I don't know about twice as fast, but my Gmail is
definitely zippier and the same goes for Google Calendar and Google
Docs.
