Now that Mozilla's locked down Firefox 3's final feature set with Friday's push of release candidate 1, it's official: while Firefox 3 boasts some great new features like a smart address bar and better bookmarks manager, the best reason to upgrade will be for the performance improvements. Firefox 3 is noticeably faster and more stable than Firefox 2 to the casual user and Mozilla engineers have numbers that show it will be the fastest browser on the market. Tech site TechWeb reports:
Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer claims that Firefox 3 is 9.3x faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 2.7x faster than Firefox 2 in terms of JavaScript performance. In terms of Gmail message load time, he claims Firefox 3 is 6.8x faster than IE7 and 3.8x faster than Firefox 2. And he says Firefox 3 beats Apple's Safari, which is also faster than Firefox 2.
Barring major bugs, RC 1 could become the final release of the third major iteration of the 'fox, slated to officially drop in June. Check out our complete field guide to testing Firefox 3 if you want to make your extensions work with the RC. If you're already using Firefox 3, be sure to type about:robots into the address bar to discover a fun little Easter egg. For a detailed list of what Firefox 3 has to offer, check out its release notes.
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