CNET.com compared the four new browsers released in beta versions -- Safari, Opera 9.5, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3 beta 4. It dubbed Firefox 3 as the best browser among them. It is faster, occupies less memory and provides a rich Web experience.
Firefox 2 was a solid browser but it still had some problems like memory usage and frequent crashes. In some cases, Firefox used to occupy nearly half a gigabyte of RAM, when some use 1 or 2 GB RAM for their computer this memory usage becomes unacceptable.
The new browser
Firefox 3 beta 4 seems to have fixed this problem; it occupies only 120MB of RAM, which is still high but comparable to other browsers.
The new Firefox has an
improved user interface, valuable security additions, much faster JavaScript, and complies with the latest Web development standards.
Firefox 3 has excellent bookmarking features to organize your bookmarks. It has a star at the URL link, which allows one click bookmarking, with no need to access the browser menus.
The new URL bar is another novel feature, which helps avoid phishing scams. For example, if the link you enter doesn’t belong to the actual site (for example eBay), it will show where exactly it is located at the URL, so you can avoid visiting those sites. When you visit DigitalJournal.com, you will see their logo at the top left in the URL bar. Here is an example below -- the big letter will help you know what the actual site is in the form of big buttons:
Where Am I? Feature in Firefox 3
Also, when you start entering addresses, it gives various suggestions just below the URL, so you can choose one of those options instead of typing the whole address. The new add-ons feature is also very good; you can search for compatible add-ons right in the browser itself, without the need to visit the Mozilla site.
To know more about the newer features
here is a good review with pictures about Firefox 3 browser.
CNET says
Firefox remains the best browser on the whole, with great features, impressive improvements, a revised bookmarking system and thousands of add-ons to make it easy to perfectly customize.
The improvements in performance are stellar; it's got some well-integrated features that everyone will use (resumable download manager, tag-ready bookmarking) and it offers, overall, a better, richer Web experience.
I have been using Firefox 3 for the past few days, and I am very happy with it. You can see the difference right away, it is
faster than the previous version Firefox 2 but also IE 7 and other browsers. Not many extensions are available now for the new Firefox 3 but once you use it, you will find it hard to go back to other versions.
Do you feel the same about Firefox 3 Beta 4?
