18 months after Firefox 2 launch, 3 years of development for much of the underlying Gecko code. Eight alphas, 5 betas, and 3 release candidates later, Firefox 3 is here. Firefox 3 is spreading fast, claiming more than 4 percent of the share of Web browser usage less than 24 hours after its release.
Undoubtedly, most Firefox 3 activity is from existing Firefox users, but it’s still a notable achievement, given that software companies constantly struggle to get users to adopt the latest products.
The open-source web browser is the fastest and most secure version of Firefox yet. Significant improvements have been made to the way it uses your computer’s resources, so the memory leaks and other performance problems found in Firefox 2 have been stamped out. Text and image rendering have also been improved, and the underlying code for Gecko, the engine that draws the actual web pages on the screen, has been updated. There are also heaps of useful features that have been added for both power users and newcomers alike.
Once a purely pedestrian feature, the location bar in Firefox 3 has been juiced up to the point where it is now central to the browsing experience. Searches are instantaneous and happen as you type. Early testers of Firefox 3 loved this new feature so much, they nicknamed it the “Awesome Bar.”
Much in the way Gmail’s powerful search box has replaced the old categorization paradigm of menus and folders for sorting and finding old e-mail messages, the Awesome Bar has largely replaced the need for a traditional bookmark filing system. Studies conducted by various sources over recent months show massive performance gains over previous versions of Firefox as well as competitors like Opera, Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows version of Safari.