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Story: Firefox 3 is released for download

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Faster, Fully Featured FireFox 3

I managed to get one of the 7 million downloads on the first day, mostly just to say I did it, in any case FireFox 3 in some sort of Beta or Release Candidate has been on my Windows CPUs here at home and at work for months.

The range of CPUs I've been running it on vary from a Pentium 4 @ 2.4 Ghz (here at home) to a Core 2 Duo 2.8 Ghz workstation (at work). I've also been running it on Windows Server 2008 RC1(and it doesn't seem to mind!). I haven't bothered to look at RAM usage or actually measure startup speed other than noting that it's slower than IE7 (but we all know why, since IE7 is “embedded” in the OS) but a lot faster than FireFox 2.0.14. I suspect that I missed an update on the release candidate string because I see marked improvements in the public release 3.0 from the previous release candidate I was running.

The features I especially like include the ability to set the Zoom for each website I visit on a regular basis. One of them being this site, of course! Yes I'm wearing my glasses but at the end of a 10 to 12 hour day staring at the screens at work, its nearly impossible to read the mouse-type on a lot of web pages especially those pushing news and opinions. Bloggers also tend to like to write big missives in small type.

I also like the “awesome bar” especially since I have a tendency to jump back and forth on the same sites.

I didn't have any problems with the Add-ons and extensions probably because I had them on both the 2.0.14 install and the Beta3 installs. Some of them are disabled because of versioning issues but I suspect that within a week or two they'll be back.

On rendering pages FireFox 3.0 smokes IE7! I have a test page that has URLs for all the pictures on the page scattered on 5 drives. 2 jpegs, 1 GIF, a TIFF and a BMP all with 24 bit color. It also has an Excel table that has been turned into HTML. IE7 takes about 45 seconds to render the page. FireFox 2 takes about 50 secs. FireFox 3 takes 25 seconds. Its not the same as using pictures scattered on separate websites BUT the disk drive access time is consistent each time. Each time I do 3 trials and I flush the cache each time so it varies with 2 maybe 3 seconds but its reasonably consistent.

Silverlight (Microsoft's attempt at a Web platform) does install but does not run video as a plug-in to FireFox 3. I did try it with version 2 of FireFox and it worked. A number of other pages on the Microsoft websites do not render properly under FireFox3 and typically they are asp pages for the most part. Windows Media Player plug-in works well under FireFox3.

Overall so far no problems. Its faster and more nimble than IE7. Its already my favorite and I'm using it now to send the review to the site.

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