Firefox logo The latest version of Mozilla Firefox, version is almost ready for prime time. It is now in Beta 4 and there are some marked improvements:

One of the most notable improvements is performance and memory usage. Since version 2 of Firefox, after a while it would become non-responsive and I would have to force-quit or terminate the browser. I use Firefox on a Mac, but I heard the same complaints from Windows users. There were memory leaks in Firefox that were so bad it would eventually consume up 1.5 GB of real memory on my system and slow everything else to a crawl until I killed and restarted it. Grant it I am a heavy browser user. I always have multiple tabs open and a lot of extensions installed. I use my browser to access and edit wiki's, blogs, email, Flickr and Google Docs. The browser is the one application I start and end my day with and use all of the time. I started using Safari for sites that I did not need Firefox's javascript compatibility or extensions for, but it is cumbersome to be switching back and forth between browsers. Firefox 3 appears to be handling memory usage much better, as well as, just rendering web pages faster.

The new full page zoom is a great accessibility feature. From the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the entire layout, including text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site. Previously, you could increase text size, but if the layout was not fluid, it could get distorted. 

The new address or location bar is easier to use. Type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you're looking for. Results are returned according to their frecency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that you're seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns. I hardly ever need to go to my Bookmarks menu any more because I can just start typing a few letters of the place I want to go.

When I do need to access bookmarks the new Smart Bookmarks Folder is very handy. You can quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as your more frequently visited pages with the new smart bookmarks folder on your bookmark toolbar. Bookmarks are easier to set with the Star button. You can quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.

There are many more improvements to the user interface and to overall security, but I just wanted to mention a few. Version 3 is still in beta, so some of you may want to wait for the completed final version, but it appears that it is in it's final beta stage. Beta 4 is much more stable than the previous betas and is showing some marked improvement.

There are also eBay and Campus targeted versions of Firefox which come bundled with related add-ons. These have been out for a few months, but I thought I mention them for those of that did not know and were still waiting to adopt Firefox amd move away from IE. What are you waiting for?

For those that just want a simple, clean and fast browsing experience, Apple has released Safari 3.1 for Windows and Mac OS X. There are no notable new features upfront, but it is noticeably faster. Behind the scenes I think Safari is the first to support some new and upcoming web standards, such as, HTML 5 and CSS web fonts and animation. 

On a side note, Mozilla developers have been using Mediawiki (the engine used to power Wikipedia) for their developer center web site, but Mindtouch has been asked to convert it to Deki Wiki, my new favorite wiki. Mindtouch has created a Mediwiki converter to help with the task.