i wonder what'll happen then the speed of the browser exceeds the average connection speed on the machine. after all, a lot of people still have dial up.

I used Beta4/5 and it crashed more than Fx2, I know people have had much better experience with it, but until tab mix plus and FEBE are supported I don't see myself using it.

Will it be faster starting up though? On my Mac Mini Safari is WAY faster at starting up than FF3. I've also found an ad blocker and del.icio.us plugin for Safari, so its my main browser. Now if only there was a way for Safari to let me add feeds to google reader...

@abhiroop: tab mix plus has a FF 3 version available, you have to goto the projects forum to get it:
[tmp.garyr.net]

@Norcross: It'll probably lag a bit after reaching maximum capacity, then redirect you to a page saying UPGRADE YOUR FCKING DIALUP, ITS 2008

Hmmm, Opera is noticibly absent.

Haha, that's funny. This is about as good as saying a turtle is faster than a snail. Why not compare it to things that have been faster than Firefox for a long time, like Opera, or even another Gecko browser, K-Meleon? It's no good to overlook things and make a "benchmark" without the facts. Things shouldn't be compared to IE and Safari because they aren't real contenders, they're bundled browsers.

Now if someone would update their Better G* extensions I would be a happy boy.........

@Major-General: And the grail is mostly absent from water bottle reviews.

Ditto on FF3 crashing more. Does seem to be faster.

What about Opera? Isnt that CURRENTLY the worlds fastest browser? Well actually I am using the Beta so you cant count that as an official browser. Oh well Opera is my secondary browser incase FireFox fails on me (which it NEVER does)

I also agree that safari performs better but the feed issue needs to be improved.

@Major-General: I hear that, while not an avid Opera user, I do tend to install it on lower spec machines as it is noticeably more resource friendly.

Perhaps they were just comparing it to the major competitors (the browsers that come installed as default with major OS')

I've had trouble with the Open Source Flash plug-in for FF3 on Hardy Heron. That in particular is what has caused it to crash on me. Other than that, it's a charm.

I agree that Mozilla has got to do something about making it startup faster.

I've been waiting for opera 9.5 to be released, since it was my main browser until I got a LOT of extentions in FF that gave me the same (and a little more) functionality. FF3 it's a lot faster than FF2, no one will argue about that, but I can't wait to see how O9.5 will perform once it's released... too bad the widgets mostly suck and there's practicaly no add-ons for it.

PS: my "back" button still doesn't work in FF3... it's greyed out and can't click on it... I have to right click in it and choose from the list to go back.

I've had a lot of trouble with Firefox 3 Beta on Hardy. I mean, I love Ubuntu and spend MUCH more time in it than Windows but it's buggy and I have to reinstall Flash all the time. Also FF crashing in Linux is unacceptable.

Maybe I should upgrade to a newer nightly build?

FF3 does seem to load my Gmail faster than any of the other browsers (including Opera).

Lifehacker published tips on how to test FF3 by using the Portable version. Is there a way to do the same thing with FF3/RC1? Version5 of the Beta has significant CPU usage issues and it is not clear if these have been fixed with the new RC1 release.

Better performance? Obviously you haven't tried scrolling on a page with more than 1 image.

Yeah well, he's partially right. If you load firefox 3 with no extensions, than it blazing fast. Luckily all the extensions I've been using so far are not badly written and are maintained, so I've managed to retain the speediness. However, things can change.

What they need:

1- A "check my extensions compatibility" option (or extension) so that I can quickly see from FF2 which extensions are available for FF3 and which aren't.

2- Get rid of the annoying "continue" step when FF2 updates your extensions on startup. Start FF. Get coffee. Come back to find "update extensions?". Choose yes. Get Beer. Come back to find "continue?". Throw beer at browser and shout "of course I want to continue, what else would I want to do?!?!". Click continue. Get cloth. Finally start browsing.

3- Get rid of that stupid "keyhole" back/forward button. I keep trying to like it, and I've given it lots of time to grow on me, but its still horrible...

Anybody know how close we are to a final release? I've been holding off on using the betas, but I'm not sure if I can wait much longer. I'm getting the tech jitters!

@abhiroop: Tab Mix Plus Dev Build:
[tmp.garyr.net]

Works fine in RC1.

Febe works fine also if you install Nightly Tester Tools:
[addons.mozilla.org]

I don't like the new address bar. Not one bit. I'll wait for an add-on to revert it to 2.0 style.

I'd been using FF3 beta 5 alongside Opera 9.5 for the last few weeks, and was pretty happy with beta 5, but just from the last day of usage I think RC1 is a significant step forward. It's been very fast, and it actually seems to GIVE BACK memory it isn't using (I had a ton of tabs open and had it up to around 350MB of RAM used, closed some of those tabs, and it went back into the low 200's, something I'd never seen a previous FF build do well).

I'm keeping Opera 9.5 around as well, but I'm liking RC1 quite a bit. Looking forward to seeing what the final release looks like (and looking forward to extension makers getting up to speed, of course).

Does this mean start-up time? 'cuz I can make a sandwich and do the dishes during the time FF2 takes to load.

@reclusivemonkey: Reader Notifier is nice, and you get Growl notifications when your feeds update as part of the deal.

@Norcross: Browser speeds have been much faster than dial-up for years.

@OX4: They mean pageload time, but the startup time of FF3 is also significantly improved.

I'm just an old, old man with horses and cows ... but, I'm with OX4 on this. Firefox 2.0.0 is slow. Safari is much quicker on my Macs. Opera 9.27 is just odd compared to Safari and Camino is okay. However, Safari rarely completely loads a page, and can take forever to load jpeg loaded pages ... I'm no techie but it seems advertising hangs it up in near perpetual download. Frankly, browsers have a long way to go yet. Or, maybe I need whatever high end equipment is used to crow about the hottest, newest bench test. Hmmm ... that's it, a terabyte of front end, a glass fiber internet connection and $27,000 of quad core Mac. Yeah. Then it'll load fast.

I have had no issues really with Firefox 3 on my thumb drive via PortableApps.com nor FF3b5 in Ubuntu. But for some reason when I load up FF in Ubuntu, it shows that there are no updates available...odd yes?

Safari faster than Firefox? didn't everyone say it sucked? and mozilla now says it has been faster than Firefox 2???

Not so odd Steve, Ubuntu needs to add the release to their repository and do some minimal testing before that I'm sure. I tried to update my firefox install myself but decided to fall back and just wait until they release the automatic update.

@abhiroop: @abhiroop:
Firefox 3 like any version of firefox going back 5 years, has only crashed for me if I had a ton of extensions installed. The more extensions I added, the

Hmmm...

Firefox 3 Beta 5 crashed too many times to mention. RC1, however, is working fine, no crashes (although hangups do occur time to time, but am running it from an external hard drive). Can't wait for June.

And yeah... Opera is oddly absent...

@Major-General: Indeed! That's the first thing I noticed. How can they say the "fastest browser on the market" then not include the fastest browser in the test findings?

FFAS if you ask me. Marketing pricks should be jailed.

I tried the beta but then uninstalled. The browser kept refreshing the web page while visiting Google Reader or Gmail. ...and that's not good!

I'd been holding off through the betas, but RC1 is very, very nice. My most important add-ons (like Tree Style Tab, which offers a vertical tab bar with collabsible tab groups, which I'd wanted forever) worked straight away; now for the fun bit with Nightly Tester Tools; might have to slim down my current 80-tab session a bit before subjecting myself to that restartathon...

@Ghede: There is already an add-on for FF3 to revert the address bar to look/act like FF2. It's called oldbar. I think a lot of people, including myself, will be installing it along w/the FF3 final release. Here you go! [addons.mozilla.org]

"oldbar makes the location (URL) bar look like Firefox 2"

Oh, Facebook Chat seems to be broken. I'm crushed. Should have it in Adium, soon, though, by the sound of things.

Praise God, RC1 lets Mac users press the up arrow key to get to the beginning of the line in the address bar. That's been long overdue.

Now that I look back, FF3, even in its current stage, is much better than FF2. Never mind the (occasional) crash, at least it doesn't freeze up all...the ... time.
But maybe that's just me.

Hey! You mean these guys are lying to me about being the "fastest web browser on earth"?
[www.avantbrowser.com]

Why is it that pre-release versions of software that come with copious warnings about possible bugs and potential work-in-progress glitches never work perfectly and never solve all my problems or make me a happy person despite all of my personal problems?

I thought speed comparisons were notoriously difficult to generalize across platform. Can someone refer me to a site where I can compare the speeds of FF3 and Safari and webkit on OS X?

It is still butt ugly in Vista.

What metric is used to make this claim? I've been using each FF3 release as it comes out. It is increasingly slow. FF3R5 takes up to 3 minutes to open to a blank page. My computer hasn't changed. I'm using a fresh install each time. I must be in an alternate universe where the laws of time and space are different.

wow i just can't wait! less than a month for the final release yeah! Maybe a will start trying the RC just to see the news features.

some tests against opera

[mootools.net]

Opera
Dojo 1.0.2----------------52ms
JQuery 1.2.3------------140ms
MooTools 1.2beta2------92ms
Prototype 1.6.0.2-------176ms

Firefox
Dojo 1.0.2---------------138ms
JQuery 1.2.3-------------226ms
MooTools 1.2beta2------195ms
Prototype 1.6.0.2--------359ms

[nontroppo.org]
Basic Render
Opera-------------------3562ms
Firefox----------------18075ms

[nontroppo.org]
Opera-------------------422ms
Firefox------------------626ms

opera build 9981
firefox 3Rc1

you can make test to do whatever you want, and sunspider's quality is said to be better than notroppo's, who, I might add, is an avid opera evangelist.

Its all about how you organize the test.

Hive mind, please reveal:

I'm running FF2 (v0.0.14) with FasterFox installed. Have benchmarks been done with FF3 or Opera when users tweaked all possible settings, rather than bog-standard?

(I'm putting off going to FF3 until 90% of my extensions are compatible.)

@longbourne: Nightly Tester Tools makes them compatible now.

Unfortunately, there is still at least one serious bug that makes Firefox 3 frustratingly slow on OS X:

[bugzilla.mozilla.org]

can i install both firefox 2 and 3 rc1 at the same time, or do i need to uninstall the former?