ZDNet has taken a look at the second beta version of Firefox 3. The reporter says Firefox 3 feels faster and more responsive again and features improved memory management.But it’s not new features that I’m interested in, it’s performance and reliability - so how does Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 stand up? Well, it’s only been out a few hours but I’ve been hammering it hard on several systems and my feeling is that beta 2 is a significant improvement on beta 1.
Functionally and visually, beta 1 and beta 2 are hard to tell apart, but after a few seconds of using them side-by-side I think that I could tell them apart on pretty much any system. Beta 2 feels snappier and far more responsive than beta 1 (or Firefox 2.0 for that matter) and I can feel the difference on all the systems that I’ve tried it on - from a lowly Sempron system to my quad-core monsters. No matter what you want doing - opening a new tab, moving tabs, opening up Find, zooming in and out of the page, bookmarking - it all happens swiftly and smoothly. Finally, Firefox feels like it’s back to being faster and more responsive than Internet Explorer. The bloat seems to have been trimmed away and what remains is fast.
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