First Look at Firefox 3.0 Beta 3

What's the best browser?  That's a question I get asked all the time.  For years now I've been pretty non-committal when it came to taking sides in the browser wars - after all, a browser is a browser and it's what's displayed in the browser window that matters, not the browser itself.  The browser is nothing more than a tool.  However, the more I handle the betas of Firefox 3.0, the more I'm becoming attached to this browser. 

Check out the Firefox 3.0 beta 3 gallery.

I've always had a love-hate relationship with Firefox.  There was always a lot I liked about the browser, but there were always more than enough downsides to prevent me from going to the hassle of installing it on all my systems.  Firefox to my mind has always been a resource hog, especially memory.  Some people swear up and down that Firefox for works like a charm for them and I don't doubt that, but something about the way I browse seems to put Firefox 1.x, 1.5.x and 2.x into a death spiral far too often for my liking.  Maybe it's because I browser aggressively, opening loads of tabs and new Windows and switching back and forth a lot.  Maybe it was something more personal than that, I don't know.

My experiences with Firefox 3.0 betas have been different.  I've been seeing consistent improvements over the betas.  Reliability is up, performance is up, ease of use if up, and resource consumption has gone down.

Last night I downloaded the Firefox 3.0 beta 3 from Mozilla and took it for a spin.

Verdict - Very impressed.

Before I go any further, I have to admit that I did suffer a lockup when on first running beta 3 but this was my darn fault - I had had another instance of Firefox running which seemed to conflict with the installation software's attempts to fire up Firefox at the end of the install..

First off, I like the changes made to the interface.  The new buttons on the toolbar look nicer, less fiddly and easier to use (to me at any rate ... I'm sure there will be people who dislike the new look).

I'm also seeing UI tweaks here and there ... mostly subtle stuff, all relating to making the browser easier to use.  Nothing that screams useless eye-candy.  Reading all the docs that accompany this release it's clear to see that Mozilla have put a lot of effort into making this release not just robust and reliable, but secure too. 

Then there are the performance gains.  I'm starting to get used to these now so they're not as apparent, but it's nice to be able to use Firefox all day and not have to kill the process periodically.  Firefox 3.0 betas have all worked great for me, and with Firefox 3.0 beta 2 the browser became solid enough to use daily on several systems. 

Because Firefox 3.0 is still in the beta phase it's unfair t carry out too much in the way of benchmarking.  My standard test so far has been to use the browser and watch the memory consumption.   The browser seems to idle at around 16.5MB and with twelve tabs open (each displaying a page from this blog) the memory usage goes up to 75.5MB - in line with how both IE7 and Opera 9.25 operate.  I'm not too fussed about how much memory the browser uses (within reason of course), but an application that doesn't release RAM and just hogs it all can quickly become a pain.  I've not seen one example where beta 2 or 3 of Firefox 3.0 has done this. 

So, here's the plan.  Personally, I'm happy to roll with beta 3 on a select number of systems.  If things stay as they are (and I have no reason think that they won't) when Firefox 3.0 is finally released, I'll be switching over to it on all my daily rigs.

Thoughts?