We've seen through various blog posts that Firefox 3 uses significantly less memory than Firefox 2 (and the dominant browser) and is so far the fastest browser according to Apple's SunSpider benchmark. But does this mean in the real world? What does it actually change for our users? Does it really make a difference? Actually, it does.
Take Gmail, a very popular and complex Ajax application. It's used by millions of people worldwide[1]. You can make your own lo-tech browser benchmark without even using a stopwatch and see by yourself how Firefox 3 makes a difference:
Launch IE7 (yeah, I know, it hurts, but well, it's for the good cause)
launch Gmail in IE7
click on a message header
when the message is loaded, click on the Older > link (on the top right corner of the window) to...
I'm super excited to see the Firefox 3 Beta 4 announcement. And as far as I can tell, I'm not alone:
Ed Burnette (ZDNet): Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2 (but relies on benchmarking done before Beta 4 was released)
ZDNet: SunSpider JavaScript score (lower is better). "Firefox 3.0 beta 4 is a very responsive browser.", along with a graph:
IE7: 22 678.4
Firefox 2: 12 460.4
Firefox 3 Beta 3: 6 473.2
Firefox 3 Beta 4: 2 801.2
Monkeybites blog at Wired: The most noticeable thing in the new beta is the blazing speed improvements "(...) beta 4 also sees an incremental drop in the memory footprint."
Ars Technica: highly robust and impressively responsive
Download Squad: The browser is also designed to use less memory, and there are major improvements to the...