WHEN a product makes big claims - like say it's set a Guinness World
Record for the most number of downloads in a day - you've got to check it out.
All to see if the 8,002,530 copies - of Firefox 3 - downloaded in the 24 hours from 10:16am between June 17 and June 18 this year (Singapore time), lives up to all the fuss.
Testing it now, we let Mozilla work out the inevitable kinks before we tested it at its current version of 3.0.1 released on July 16.
Firefox 3 has more than 15,000 soup-ups, according to Mozilla.
Among the top three, I'd say, are installation ease, speed and stability, which were the things I tested.
Installation took less than 30 seconds. My collection of more than 3,000 bookmarks were automaticallytransferred from the existing Firefox 2 - in perfect order. Firefox 3 is a speedy Gonzales.
Three times faster than Firefox 2. YouTube videos start almost immediately.
It sailed through the battery of tests in Sunspider Javascript 0.9 - a common browser speed test - in an average of 6,400ms compared to 22,000ms for Firefox 2.
The second iteration was accused of
gobbling up memory. I had 50 tabs open in Firefox 3 including 10 YouTube videos - an unreal number.
The music of the YouTube clips played on with no skips but some of
the videos became choppy. Firefox 3 has also got smarter: It learns your surfing habits. After a while, you just type a few letters and it throws out a list of suggested sites. The one you want is probably near the top. I typed in just "t" and "i" and Straitstimes.com appeared in the list. Wow. Page improvements are also there:
Previous know-how allowed only text to be enlarged. It flowed awkwardly around pictures which remained the same size.
With Firefox 3, images and even videos like YouTube clips can bemagnified along with text - all smoothly done. Truly impressive.
Here's an overdue feature. Almost completed downloading a whopper of a file and your PC crashes?
Boot up, relaunch Firefox and the download will continue as if nothing had happened. You can also pause a download in office, disconnect and then continue later.
The latest browser has also been made more secure.
Mosey on to any malicious site, like a phishing site - fake sites designed to cheat you to reveal your identity or financial details - and a message large enough to cover your browser will appear to warn and stop you from going further.
The one huge geek draw of Firefox remains its tweakability. It already works great as a barebones browser but you can make it your own by choosing from a menu of more than 5,000 free add-ons.
The top dog among browsers by numbers is still Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). Given Firefox 3's upgrades, it's no wonder that Firefox is gaining ground.
Final say
Smarter, faster and more secure. Firefox 3 is the current gold standard for browsers.
This story was first published in The Straits Times, Digital Life on 27 August 2008.
