What's the best beta? IE 8 vs Opera 9.5 vs Safari vs Firefox 3

By Nate Lanxon on 17 March 2008, 11:47am

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Mozilla Firefox 3, beta 4
What's new?
Firefox 2 suffers massive problems with memory usage, so much so that it's not unheard of for the browser to use half a gigabyte of RAM on a well-specced machine. On slower machines this kind of overhead can cripple the browsing experience. This has been largely remedied in version 3.0, with a daily average RAM consumption in our experience of around 120MB -- still quite high, but far, far more acceptable and in line with other browsers.

New bookmarking features have been integrated, making it easier to add and organise favourite sites. A little star sits in the address bar now, allowing one-click bookmarking. Bookmarks Manager has also been upgraded for easier management of links and tagging, and to reduce browser load times and boost performance.

Report to your manager
Firefox is famous for its wealth of add-ons and these can now be discovered and managed within the 'fox's add-on manager, negating the need to visit Mozilla's site to find extensions. A searchable download manager makes add-ons easier to locate and manage, and downloads can now be resumed between browser sessions.

While Internet Explorer has attempted to innovate, it's simply evolution, not revolution (though Automated Crash Recovery fans may argue this if ACR works like it should). The same can be said for Firefox 3 -- one of FF 3's key improvements is its better management of PC resources, something that should've been fixed in a previous version.

How it compares
Firefox remains the best browser on the whole, with great features, impressive improvements all-round, a revised bookmarking system and thousands of add-ons to make it easy to perfectly customise.

The improvements in performance are stellar, it's got some well-integrated features than everyone will use (resumable download manager, tag-ready bookmarking) and it offers, overall, a better, richer Web experience. We're behind Firefox and we hope that when the final release is out it'll be just that little bit better to boot.