Firefox Wins Me Over – Mostly
I mentioned previously about Firefox 3 betas being out and that they weren’t really ready yet for regular folks to use (really too buggy). The latest version, Beta 4, really fixed up a LOT of the issues and is actually pretty usable. It is also quite usable on OS X.
Why mention OS X specifically? In the past, Firefox would work fine but excepting for some of the extension abilities, Safari and Camino were both much faster and better integrated browsers. Most of the major extensions from Firefox could be replicated in each via plug-ins as well (ad-blocking and search engine editing). The biggest detractor was that Firefox would hog memory like crazy causing the rest of the system to slow down.
It seems they’ve really fixed up the memory issues because the current beta works very well. Ars Technica has some specifics, but the general consensus is that Firefox memory usage on all platforms has been drastically reduced – and from my usage on both PC and OS X it feels like it has been noticeably improved. This version also reinforces my opinion that IE 8 is not going to be any better than its predecessors.
You’ll still want to be careful using a beta version, especially since many extensions aren’t compatible and there are still bugs to be worked out, but giving it a run to see what is coming up certainly wouldn’t hurt.
Now if only they could get Firefox to work with the OS X Keychain for passwords and certificates or have the smooth styling of Safari, I’d be more willing to switch completely.
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Ugh. i swear safari loses cookies and logs me out every once in a while and it sucks.
yeah, firefox being faster and using less memory is good. that’s the only reason I don’t use it now. I might have to try out the beta. hmm.