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Firefox Beta Touts Advanced Engine, Solves 8 Flaws
nandemoari writes "Mozilla may be this year's winner in the 'browser battles' as they ready the next beta version of their tour-de-force, Firefox 3.1. Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox — a move sure to garner applause from devoted Firefox users.
As this year's crop of new browsers emerges, enhanced features are becoming secondary to one thing: speed. Mozilla is nearly ready to release the next beta version of Firefox 3.1 to the public for testing, and insiders predict that it will outpace even Safari 4, which has been the fastest browser in wide release since its beta began last week." It looks like they also will be upping the next major release to v3.5 to better show the significance of the release.
Yes, but Firefox has a faster turnaround time as it is. Microsoft only patches once a month, often misses critical patches and then didn't update their browser for years. Mozilla was the first true competition that IE had, has a fast turnaround time, and patches vulnerabilities fast, often within days of being made aware of them. Sometimes they don't do as well as they could, but when they're able to put out 3 major versions of their browser, 2 .5 versions and many smaller ones within the time that IE's able to put out 2 new versions, they deserve praise instead of scorn.
Yikes! Opera peaks at 250MB, and stays there. They really need to work on the memory issues. Even though I don't even touch computers with less than 4GB RAM, it's pretty sick to see 25% of that eaten by a web browser.
I agree, although I had Opera ranked over FF for casual browsing. I only used FF for it's web developer tools and firebug. Now I have made the move to Chrome for casual browsing, so now FF is in 3rd place.
Where Chrome is really better than opera is closing down. I can have 20 tabs open in Chrome and when I close the application, I recover all the memory pretty much instantly. Opera needs about 2-3 minutes where it actually takes more memory (e.g. jumps from 170MB to 210MB ram) before finally closing down internally. As I mentioned elsewhere, FF in windows normally just crashes upon closing, taking 100% CPU usage and requiring killing from the task manager. Therefore I use it as little as possible.
Adblock is not a dealbreaker. I have it installed in FF but it's normally off. The sites I visit don't require blocking ads. I won't visit a site so obnoxious that it would require adblocking to be functional.
You can speed up firefox especially with the super bar by using tmpfs to put the firefox profile in your ram. A guide can be found at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-717117.html
Try Swiftweasel. The native Linux firefox versions are all compiled completely unoptimized. Swiftweasel just enables some of the i686 and -O2 optimizations and it's still Firefox, all my plugins work, but it doesn't dog down like Firefox proper (I still have it installed, I've compared the two).
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