Firefox 3, Beta 4, Enhancements 900, Tested 5
By Davey Winder in Editorial
I’m a sucker for risking it all and installing beta software, especially when its my favourite browser client Firefox. OK, so I don’t install this stuff on a business critical machine, it goes on the test lappy instead. Which is exactly where Firefox 3, Beta 4 has been for the last 24 hours or so. Now I cannot claim hand on heart to have experienced all 900 claimed enhancements that this release brings, but I thought I might share my views on the few that I have noticed.
First and foremost there’s the memory issue, you know that one whereby Firefox has traditionally had something of a problem with letting go. This presents itself in a not so wonderful propensity to keep using more and more memory the more you use it, and not give it back when you close windows etc. Memory bloat is a terrible thing, especially on a Vista driven laptop which has enough trouble keeping up as it is. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Mozilla developers have kept to their word and done something about it. Claiming to have plugged hundreds of memory leaks, the team have certainly done something as it does not slow down as quickly as it used to and memory fragmentation seems noticeably reduced.
But it was the security stuff that I most naturally and most quickly gravitated towards, from the neat ability to integrate with your AV scanner and show the results inside the new download manager, through to being able to click on a favicon in the toolbar to get details of an Extended Validation SSL certificate if the site is using one. Hit the more button next to the verification data and you can view cookies and passwords associated with your site usage and even configure image loading and pop-up capability. Nice. As is the built-in warning of potential danger from sites known to host malware. I should be pleased that Firefox will now automatically disable older and unsafe extensions, but in practise I am not because some older extensions are useful and not inherently unsafe as long as you are cautious in your usage. Oh well.
Best of all, it has not crashed my Vista laptop once, has been noticeably quicker than previous versions and all bides well for the final release whenever that may appear…
Rated: 100% (3 votes)
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