Firefox 3 Debuts with Web Domination in Its Sights Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Out to Set Records Sean Michael Kerner
After more than 18 months of development and a slew of releases — including five alphas, five betas, and three Release Candidates — the wait for
Mozilla's Firefox 3 is nearly over.
Starting today at 10 AM Pacific Daylight Time, the Web browser will become available in its final form, introducing a myriad of new features and enhancements.
The Firefox 3 release aims to improve the Web experience for the browser's 170 million users while expanding market share even further, coming as it does months ahead of the next major release from Microsoft, Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8).
While Microsoft holds the top spot in browsers, Mozilla is banking that a number of improvements in Firefox 3 could put it into the lead.
At the heart of the new release is a focus on speed. Mozilla developers claim the new release outpaces both Firefox 2 and Microsoft's current Internet Explorer 7.
"We're about 10 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and about three times faster than Firefox 2," Mozilla developer Mike Beltzner told InternetNews.com.
The metric that Beltzner was using for speed relates to JavaScript performance on the relative browsers.
Additionally, Mozilla conducted an application-specific test that compared relative performance on Google's Gmail service. Beltzner said Firefox 3 proved to be four times faster than Firefox 2 and seven times quicker than IE 7.
Memory usage also improved substantially in Firefox 3. Many users had complained about Firefox 2's memory-hogging tendencies, especially when multiple tabs remained open throughout the course of a day.
"We looked at ways of breaking memory cycles that weren't being freed up and we looked at ways of allocating memory better," Beltzner said.
Compared to Firefox 2, Firefox 3 uses less memory to start and releases the memory properly when a particular tab is closed.
"This is important because people are browsing more — they're leaving their browser open more during the day and they are leaving tabs and windows open," Beltzner said. "So we wanted to make sure we were being responsible with memory."
From a technical perspective, a big contributor to Firefox 3's memory improvements come by way of the XPCOM (Cross Platform Component Object Model) cycle collector. XPCOM is a tool that identifies objects that aren't being used and releases them from memory.
Mozilla first publically introduced XPCOM into the development cycle last November for the Beta 1 release. For Beta 1 alone, Mozilla claimed developers plugged 300 memory leaks with additional leaks plugged during subsequent beta releases.
Beyond performance enhancements, Firefox 3 also introduces new features including a "smart" location address bar, internally dubbed the "awesome bar".
"Just like tabbed browsing revolutionized the way people browse, I think what we've done with the smart location bar will also revolutionize the way people browse," Beltzner said.
Instead of having to bookmark, remember or use a search engine to locate a site, a user can simple type a query term into the location bar and all previously visited sites that include the term will display in a drop down from the address bar.
Adding a bookmark is also simplified — now it's as easy as clicking on the star icon on the address bar to bookmark any page. Bookmarks can also have tags associated with them which will also help when a smart address bar query is entered.
"It sounds like a small thing but it turns out to change the way you browse," Beltzner said.
