Firefox 3 Is Ready. Sorta. Kinda.
We love living on the edge. We sometimes take a chance and drink milk from a carton so old that the lost child pictured on it has already been found. We've even been known to participate in beta tests of buggy software. But we're a little leery of monkeying around with web browsers until they're finished, because we don't even trust them not to tell gangsters all our passwords even when they're working properly. So even though Mozilla calls the latest work-in-progress iteration of the Firefox browser a "release candidate," instead of a "beta test," we're going to let some other brave soul monkey around with it until it's ready. Someone like Lifehacker, with their Top Ten Firefox 3 Features. We like number one a lot:
It's not flashy, and it doesn't have any social networking features, but Firefox 3's actual performance is the best reason anyone should consider upgrading, or making the switch to the 'fox. Firefox's engineers claim that their third major release is 9.3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 in JavaScript performance, and 2.7 times faster than Firefox 2. This means snappier browser performance when you're using webapps like Gmail, Remember the Milk, and more. Even more important, especially for Mac users, is the improved memory usage and more than 15,000 improvements that make for a less crash-prone browser. I've seen noticeable speed-ups in page loading in Linux, XP, and Vista, but the real reason I've switched over to using Release Candidate 1 is that I haven't had to cross my fingers every time a Flash-based video loads.
Call us when it's ready, Mozilla, we'll be all over it. We're too busy monkeying around with SproutBuilder and spilling stuff in Google Labs to pay attention just yet. You guys can't even make up your mind if it's called "Firefox 3" or "Gran Paradiso" anyway. "Release candidate." Hmmm. Is that like being eligible for parole?
It's not flashy, and it doesn't have any social networking features, but Firefox 3's actual performance is the best reason anyone should consider upgrading, or making the switch to the 'fox. Firefox's engineers claim that their third major release is 9.3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 in JavaScript performance, and 2.7 times faster than Firefox 2. This means snappier browser performance when you're using webapps like Gmail, Remember the Milk, and more. Even more important, especially for Mac users, is the improved memory usage and more than 15,000 improvements that make for a less crash-prone browser. I've seen noticeable speed-ups in page loading in Linux, XP, and Vista, but the real reason I've switched over to using Release Candidate 1 is that I haven't had to cross my fingers every time a Flash-based video loads.
Call us when it's ready, Mozilla, we'll be all over it. We're too busy monkeying around with SproutBuilder and spilling stuff in Google Labs to pay attention just yet. You guys can't even make up your mind if it's called "Firefox 3" or "Gran Paradiso" anyway. "Release candidate." Hmmm. Is that like being eligible for parole?
