| Is Firefox 3 ready for prime time? |
Mar. 24, 2008
 Review -- Firefox 3 may still be a beta, Beta 4 to be exact, but in a recent Reuters news story, Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said of the browser, "In many ways it is much more stable than anything else out there."
Is Firefox 3 Beta 4 ready for prime time? The Firefox Beta 4 Web page still declared, as of March 24, that Mozilla does "not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download this beta release, as it is intended for testing purposes only."
Further underlining this point is that the Mozilla developers have decided "that a fifth beta milestone would be required based on the number of blockers remaining."
The code-freeze for the fifth beta took place on March 18. If all goes well, users will see Firefox 3 Beta 5 on March 27. The final release date for Firefox will be, as Asa Dotzler put it in the "Mozilla: For the Record" blog, "When it's ready."
And when might that be? My best guesstimate is June 2008.
OK, so Reuters jumped the gun. Still, how ready is Firefox 3 for everyday use? I decided to find out.
First I downloaded a copy of Firefox 3 Beta 4 to today's test system. To give Firefox a fair try, I installed it on one of my main desktop systems.
This system is an HP Pavilion a6040n desktop PC. This 2007 vintage PC is powered by a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 dual-core processor. It has 2GB of 533MHz RAM and a 320GB SATA (Serial ATA) hard drive running at 7,200 rpm. For the display, this PC uses an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 32MB of dedicated graphics memory. On this computer, I run OpenSUSE 10.3.
Over the last few days, I've used this system for my usual work and fun. The first thing I noticed is that, even as a beta, Firefox 3 is faster than Firefox 2.12. In particular, screen updates were snappier.
That was impressive, but what was far more impressive was how Firefox ripped through JavaScript-based applications and applets. Here, I found that Firefox 3 ran about three times as fast as Firefox 2 with the same programs. For example, Firefox 3 zoomed along in Gmail.
This wasn't just my impression. Using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, Firefox 3 Beta 4 ran this popular JavaScript basics benchmark in 5,694.6 milliseconds. Firefox 2.12 ran the same tests in 19,616 milliseconds. So, it's actually running JavaScript faster than my eyes alone were telling me.
What made me even happier than Firefox's newly boosted performance is that the new version finally does a decent job of memory management. In the past, Firefox was like a boat with holes in the hull. It would run great at first, but as time went on it would leak more and more memory, and it would get slower and slower. Eventually, and I know because I've seen it, it would sink.
This time the developers have patched up hundreds of memory leaks and the good ship Firefox can run without slowing and sinking a system from constantly leaking memory. Better still, Firefox now includes its own memory garbage collector: the XPCOM Cycle Collector. With this, Firefox modules can do a much better job of releasing memory to the system when it's no longer needed by any running routines.
As far as features are concerned, Firefox 3 comes with a greatly augmented Places Organizer that works hand-in-glove with the Location bar & auto-completion and the Smart Bookmarks Folder. This gives you, for example, the ability to add tags to bookmarks or Web pages, and then easily search for, say, Web pages tagged "Red Hat" that you've looked at in the last week. My one problem with this is that I have never been convinced of the value of tagging. To me, it's always seemed a lazy way of organizing that's all too prone to typos. I'm far happier using a cataloging system to keep track of what's what. Your browser usage may vary.
The beta browser also has several security improvements. One that I really appreciate is that now when I log onto a password-protected site, Firefox 3 asks me whether I want to save my password, after I've managed to log in. As one of the fastest, but sloppiest, typists in the known universe, I really appreciate Firefox waiting until I get it right before asking if I want to preserve my password.
Firefox 3 also now includes information about who actually owns a secure Web site -- or at least who owns its SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. The program also lets you know if you're clicking your way to a site that's suspected of phishing, redirecting you another site or harboring malware. The Web will never be completely safe to wander at random in, but Firefox 3 has gone the extra mile to make it more secure.
I also found that Firefox itself was, as Schroepfer indicated, more stable. Now, whether it's more stable than the rest, I'm not ready to say after only three days of working with it. What I can say, however, is it has proven itself to be more stable than Firefox 2.
So, with all that in mind, is Firefox 3 ready for production use? Well, my verdict is it's not quite there yet. While I didn't run into a single problem, there are enough known bugs that Mozilla is still working on that I can't recommend most users move to it. Still, if you're technically inclined and don't mind living dangerously, Firefox 3, even now, is worth running. Just don't trust anything too valuable to it. OK? OK!
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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