Review – According to Mozilla, Firefox 3 final is just days away from its release and there is every indication that the RC2 released today may actually represent the final version of the browser. That was reason enough for us to give Firefox 3 RC2 a thorough test drive and single out the most important  improvements you can expect over Firefox 2.0.x.

Firefox 3 is a massive upgrade over Firefox 2 with more than 14,000 changes over the 2.0 generation that was released in October of 2006. The great majority of those changes happened under the hood and aren’t immediately visible to, but there are enough user-centric improvements to make this new version a worthwhile update.    

If you expect Firefox 3 to be drastically different in appearance, features and UI philosophy than what the previous version offered, then you will be disappointed up to the fact when you may wonder if this new browser should have been an incremental and minor upgrade instead. For instance, when you first fire up Firefox 3, you will hardly notice any visible difference to the previous version. However, there was nothing really wrong with the previous interface anyway and we are just fine with an evolutionary modification.

There are many minor tweaks subtle enhancements that you may be noticing only over days of regular usage. To us, the interface looks like an intelligently, thoroughly improved product that offers much more fluid browsing experience than the previous version. As the time goes by, you really begin noticing that Mozilla dramatically improved the browser code, mostly evident in visible speed improvements. Here is a low-down of the most important Firefox 3 improvements.


Speedier, more reliable performance

Firefox 3 sports an overhauled Gecko rendering engine, now in version 1.9, which delivers significant performance improvements. This directly translates to a visibly speedier performance of the web browser in general, especially through with faster page loading times. The run-time performance is notably accelerated over Firefox 2, especially with multiple tabs open at once. Even with 30 tabs open, Firefox 3 remained much more responsive than Firefox 2, which had a tendency to slow down your PC.

The JavaScript engine, a critical browser component powering web applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, Yahoo Mail, Zoho Office etc., has been optimized, leading to an increased UI responsiveness and faster performance in web applications. Mozilla claims sites such as Gmail will run twice as fast in Firefox 3. At least the web applications I am using on a daily basis felt, subjectively, faster and more responsive.


Better memory handling

Widely reported memory leaking bugs in Firefox 2 often lead to system memory fragmentation as the browser fails to return allocated chunks of memory when exiting. This problem has been addressed in an apparently proper way. We were not able to detect any memory leaks in Firefox 3. The browser has a slightly larger memory footprint (33.5 MB compared to Firefox 2's 26 MB), while both browsers seem to use an equal amount of memory when opening multiple tabs. 30 TG Daily tabs resulted 84.5 MB of allocated memory in Firefox 3, while Firefox 2 ended up at 79 MB.


Protection against phishing sites

Phishing refers to a malicious cheating technique that involves pixel-perfect clones of established sites, such as PayPal, to fool users into providing critical data such as login credentials or credit card information. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer comes with a built-in security certificate called Extended Validation (EV) SSL, which is a set of rigorous security checks of the operator of a website. EV certificates promise that a website you are visiting is genuine. IE indicates this by changing address bar background to green while you visit a site with EV certificate. Firefox, however, lacked EV support by default and was available in version only through a third-party add-on.

Firefox 3 now supports EV certificate by default. If you visit PayPal, the site's icon is prominently displayed as a green button in the Firefox 3 address bar, which you can click to get the details of the site's certificate, check the owner of the site and see if the connection between Firefox 3 and the site is protected from eavesdropping. This can mean a world of difference to less experienced users. So, if you visit PayPal to login into your account, check for the green bar first. If it's not there, think twice before using your login credentials and check the website address again.


Improved malware protection and notification

Firefox 3 includes improved protection against sites known to distribute harmful code, such as spyware, trojans, viruses, etc. Firefox 2 had basic protection against such sites by checking the website against Google's database of harmful sites or a publicly available database, based on your preference. Firefox 3 also tweaks web forgery protection by not showing the content of pages suspected as forgeries. Firefox 3 no longer has the preference option to choose between Google and the Mozilla database, but offers users an option options to activate malware and web forgery protection.

When Firefox 3 encounters an invalid SSL certificate, it now shows a more detailed error page. Whenever you start the browser, it checks your add-ons and plug-in versions to disable incompatible software, reducing the chances of browser instability due to incompatible add-ons or plug-ins. Firefox 3 is now integrated with your anti-virus software in a way that it automatically notifies the anti-virus application whenever it starts downloading an executable file. If you set Vista Parental Controls to disable file downloads for a certain user account, Firefox 3 will respect this setting and not allow downloads.

Read on the next page, Bookmarks, offline support, tweaks and conclusion