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Firefox 3.0 hits the streets - and my - it's fast

I did plan to get in early today but the Northern Line conspired against me. And then another distraction - a new version of Firefox. The much anticipated 3.0 - the difficult third album. Anyway - since I'm running late anyway I thought I might as well waste a few more minutes trying it out and checking the site works with it.

And I'm glad I bothered. It's noticeably speedier. They're fiddled with the interface - always contentious - but so far all I've seen are improvements. It apparently uses less memory too and has souped-up security - well we'll see about that in due course - but first impressions are that this is well worth the minute or two spent downloading all 7Mb of it and installing!

Get it here!

We already found here in Finextra towers that Firefox 2.0 left IE7 standing in performance terms - now it's even further behind! Mind you - Microsoft certainly lead in the PR dept - I doubt they'd have messed up a launch like this.

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Comments: (1)

A Finextra member
A Finextra member 19 June, 2008, 10:07Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

Here at Caplin Systems we've been testing FF3 for a few months in beta. We do a lot of work with Ajax apps, and it's spectacularly fast at running those -- much faster than FF2, and even further ahead of IE7. They've done some amazing work on optimising the JavaScript engine.

What's really weird though, is the results we've been getting with the IE8 betas that Microsoft has been shipping. The JavaScript performance in that is WORSE than IE7, and massively worse than Firefox or Safari.

The more paranoid people here are suggesting that Microsoft has deliberately sabotaged the Ajax performance in IE8 in preparation for their big push with Silverlight. Is this plausible?

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