New Beta 4 Puts the Fire Back in Firefox 3
Firefox 3 beta 4 is hot off the presses, bringing an impressive speed boost and more refinements to Firefox’s sleek new user interface.
The most noticeable thing in the new beta is the blazing speed improvements, particularly with JavaScript-heavy pages like Gmail which load in about half the time of previous releases. The release notes say the speed boost comes from changes to Firefox’s JavaScript engine as well as the “profile guided optimization” that we’ve mentioned before.
Aside from the speed, the fourth beta release of Firefox 3 also features new improvements to the user interface, particularly in Windows Vista where the UI now matches the look of other platforms. Vista now sports the “keyhole” back/forward buttons and some new glossy, Vista-looking icons, as well as native Vista widgets for web forms.
There are a number of other minor tweaks and bug fixes, including changes to the way page zooming works, better searching in the downloads window and a refined history search algorithm.
As with the other Firefox 3 betas, beta 4 also sees an incremental drop in the memory footprint. Long browsing sessions with beta 3 on Mac OS X typically put Firefox up around 300 MB of RAM. However, after being open for several hours last night and a few more this morning, my copy of beta 4 is still using only 167 MB of RAM.
Although Firefox 3 beta 4 is still a beta and bugs remain, if you’ve been itching to try out the svelte new version, beta 4 is stable enough for casual use. You can download a copy from the Mozilla site. Remember to give the Firefox team your feedback after you’ve had a chance to test it out.
Also note that it appears that Firefox 3 will be going to a fifth beta before it reaches the final release stage later this year.
See Also:
