Mozilla is Dead Serious in Making Firefox 3 “The Best”

As you are probably aware, Mozilla announced on March 11th, that Firefox 3 Beta 4 was available for download.  I usually don’t rush to install Beta or Alpha software due to the many bugs which make you lose a lot of time.  I prefer to install the applications once they are polished and ready to go.  I understand, Mozilla is planning to announced Beta 5 by the end of the month.

Having said that, there’s a lot of buzz on the Internet regarding the many new features and improvements made to Firefox 3.   For example, Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 31 months.

Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 12,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.  Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

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.

Of the many improvements made to Firefox 3 aka Paradiso, I would like to highlight the following two upgrades:

1. Speed:  Improvements to the JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in significant improvements.   Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 4, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
2. Memory Management:  Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 Beta 4 over a web browsing session.  Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.  For more technical information regarding memory leakage, please click here.

You can check out the full list of improvements and updates on Mozilla’s Release Notes; in addition, Mozilla Links blog has a comprehensive review of this newest Firefox beta release.

As you can see, Firefox 3 promises to be a quantum leap forward, not only in form, but also in content.  I can’t wait until it’s finished and ready to go!